Скачать или смотреть A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving, 1989

“Mariner meandering, dogged ends…” —lol. Silly.

09/06/2025 - 12/15/2025

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Timestamps:
00:00:00 Messing around
00:02:15 Reading (slowly)
02:24:36 Thinking…

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Maybe it’s because I read this book over the span of 3 months (or, stopped-and-started, 2-ish years), maybe it’s because my reading brain is rusted (soup + mush), but I really have been trying and failing to gather something coherent about the craft behind A Prayer for Owen Meany. There’s both too much and not enough online about it.

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Irving plots, is a plotter, that’s for sure. In hindsight the mechanics of each convergence/revelation are clear, mechanical. But the details are so detailed, the meander of the narrator’s storytelling (generally few timestamps, few extended scenes aside from high action) so meandering, that my own delight buoys me through the first read and I miss the mechanics, for the most part. And then there’s this:

“There are so many stances involved, so many postures you can assume while telling a story; they can be much more deliberate, much more in a writer’s control, than an amateur knows. The reader, of course, shouldn’t be aware of much of this” (“John Irving, The Art of Fiction No. 93,” The Paris Review).

The posture here is first person, but Irving is very good at reaching for omniscience through the imagination of Johnny Wheelwright. Sometimes I forget that Johnny’s perspective isn’t “neutral” third person omniscient, even though he’s not subtle in exposing (indeed, lamenting) his total partiality. Perhaps it’s the trap of a Joseph/Graff first-person narrator, a self-proclaimed observer type who witnesses the tragic life of a character, an Owen Meany/Siggy who lives and dies by fierce convictions. Before I’ve even thought about it, I’m trusting their account.

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John Irving certainly has his convictions. I don’t know that a story must be “about” something—setting out To Write About seems like a long dead end—but I do think a story tends to become about many things when its writer has and knows their own convictions.

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What about the women? Often they feel like empty vessels for symbolic meaning, or simple archetypes, but a few also have their own particularities: Tabby Wheelwright, Hester. They’re not tragic figures; I come away with the impression that their lives were less tragic than Owen’s, or even Johnny’s.

And despite all the pages and symbols devoted to it, all the female characters wasted on the subject, lust is an intellectually tepid affair. Then again, Irving has said he’s a storyteller, not an intellectual.

In Irving’s writing, lust and sex appeal are both ubiquitous and (to this reader) boring. If that’s the point, it’s a point belabored.

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What about faith, and people with faith? Owen Meany is about as doubtless as they come. That’s partly why he strikes me as such a character, a person of fiction. Owen never ages; Owen’s faith never has time to falter. Johnny Wheelwright is a lazy Joseph, then a zealous convert upon Owen’s death. As he ages, his faith in God wavers, but his faith in Owen Meany never does. That, to me, feels true. As for John Irving, he says in interviews that he always starts with the endings of stories, of characters: in the end, there is no doubt. He’s an Owen Meany, and like Owen, he has a flair for dramatic irony and suspense.

“I know books change. I know we are all insecure about what we truly mean. But your books always create the perfect illusion that you know exactly all those parts of the story as you are telling us just one of the parts, and that simply makes everything true—makes you the absolute authority. You have to be a writer to feel that. Period” ("John Irving to Kurt Vonnegut, December 1, 1982," The Lilly Library Online Exhibitions).

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I need to figure out how to think about what I’ve read.

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