Book Reviews: A Prayer for Owen Meany

As William Morris goes to press with a new publication of A Prayer for Owen Meany, the reading public is again presented with an American classic.  John Irving doesn’t simply write:  he illuminates.  Disturbing and wondrous, A Prayer for Owen Meany discovers one man’s faith within the fallacies of human belief.  While it sounds deep, Irving’s characters and writing portend more than a dubious diatribe on religion.  He falls deeply into the context of the relationship between Owen Meany and John Wheelwright, two boys from a sleepy 1953 town in New Hampshire.  Owen and Johnny combine personalities both defective and miraculous in this tale of friendship, courage, loss, and the ability to believe in something beyond ourselves.  When Irving throws in the miracle of Owen Meany through the eyes of Johnny Wheelwright, we fall under the spell of Irving’s combustible and august writing skills.  Simply tremendously wonderful.

Owen Meany is a small kid, tiny even, in stature.  The other kids in his town, including Johnny, raise him into the air and pass him overhead at Sunday school.  But Owen, with a voice that defies weird, holds his own.  Owen Meany and Johnny begin a harrowing journey in 1953 as 11 year old boys.  Owen’s father owns a granite company.  John Wheelwright’s family is matriarchal – he lives with his austere grandmother, related to John Adams and ancestors banked on the Mayflower, and his startlingly beautiful mother Tabitha.  Johnny is singled out because he has been born out of wedlock, and Tabitha refuses to name his father.  But everyone loves Tabitha, and the town accepts anything that she does; she is too loveable and beautiful for anyone not to adore her.  Owen is odd.  His uncommon voice and uncommon self confidence and mental acuity along with Johnny’s reticence and fear attract them to each other like magnets.  They are inseparable, although Owen’s cold and lower class family serves as the opposite to John’s grandmother’s heritage: the Wheelwrights own the town.  And Owen and Tabitha are like son and mother; Tabitha considers Owen her second son.  The fact that John is a slow learner does not affect Owen, for Owen feels that he has to protect and teach Johnny the lessons of school and life.  And he does.  When Owen throws a pitch at a little league game and hits the ball for the first time in his life, it goes foul, hits Tabitha in the temple and she falls, immediately killed.  Both Owen and Johnny know they have lost the angel in their lives, and it only makes them closer. 

Irving, the master of first sentences, might give us a preview – but not the particulars.  For these characters resonate as our family members always do.  We are part of the script.

As Johnny and Owen co create their story of the turbulent 60’s, the political disasters, the horrors of Vietnam, the loss of faith in our country and ourselves – we never lose our passion for strange, prophetic Owen and Johnny, his best friend.  You just don’t get better than Irving.