Rating: 
Summary: This Book According to Me
Review: This was a big dissapointment. Take the title; "The World Accrording to Garp." Now, from a title like that you'd expect a protagonist who is extremely opinionated yet with a certain lovable charm. Garp is none of these things. He is just a morbiddly overprotective father and a bad writer. At the beginning of the book, the portions about Jenny Fields, I felt that anyone with such an unusual mother was bound to be an interesting character. But I could not see how being raised by an asexual eccentric single mother had the slightest effect on Garp's personality. Garp could've been raised by alien squirels disquised as Tibetian Monks and it would have seemed just as relevant to his personality. It seems as though Jenny was just provided to give an "interesting" background to an otherwise boring character; as though the author were just simply trying to be absurd. The whole book is like that, filled with puzzle pieces that don't fit. Even Irving doesn't seem to know what the book is about. Is it about feminism? Is it about about the struggles of the writer? Is it about media-hype? Is it about infedelity? (By the way, why in every modern book does every married couple cheat on each other? Are these writers so incapable of finding something else to provide drama in married life? I get so sick of it, and I can't stand these so-called "adult" and mature attitudes that the characters have about it. It's all so blaise and sophisticated, I want to puke.) Anyway, I just don't get it. I don't understand why the book became a best seller. To be a best seller, a book has to be more than just good. (It doesn't even have to be good, as this book points out and demonstrates all at the same time.) It has to speak to some current issue or it has to touch some raw nerve in the general population. I can't see how this book did either. Well, maybe it spoke to those people in the late 70's who were making the transition from hippies to yuppies and were caught in that middle peroid where they were living shallow lives of domestic irresponcibilty. This book seems to have that sort of spirit oozing through it. It seems to be written by that sort of person and it seems to be about those sort of people. But for me in the earlier 21st century, all I see is a piece of garbage. I was very tempted to just throw this book away....what a piece of GARP!!!!!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Garp holds it all together
Review: ... I thought this book was an extraordinary read. This was my first exposure to John Irving, and I was very impressed. This story is told on several levels and touches on a plethora of life defining topics. It is funny yet tragic; violent yet tender; at times emotionally simple and at others emotionally complex. It deals with rape, death, and infidelity; it looks at the women's lib movement, at extremism, at writers and writing; and so on. But T. S. Garp, one of fictions most memorable characters, holds it all together. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in great contemporary literature. I'm looking forward to reading more John Irving.
Rating:
Summary: Inside The World According to Garp
Review: In this novel, not only does John Irving tell us about the twisted and wonderful "world according to garp", but he lets the reader expirience it. Through the use of his dry humor, vivid imagery and incredible story-telling, John Irving has created a masterpiece.
"The World According to Garp" tells the story of T.S. Garp,a writer, and his eccentric femminist mother, Jenny(also a writer). We follow Garp through childhood and adulthood, once he has his own family. The book deals with shocking and serious issues, such as rape, infidelity, and death. Yet, woven through this dramatic tale is a kind of twisted humor that is extremely refreshing. Irving portrays Garp's unique imagination though Garp's writing, and through Garp's life expiriences. We are drawn into Garp's amazing world and learn to laugh and almost believe it.
Rating:
Summary: Lightly philosophical smut.
Review: Irving is a good writer, and at times shows signs of being able to find some action more complicated and interesting than, say, a chemically stimulated beetle might think of to anchor his story. But in the end, he tends to solve Middle Class angst with the usual unusual permutations of sex. (I don't mean in the end of the book; I didn't get that far.) For all his good humor and skill as a writer (and the book does flow well), one would hope he would get a life, or at least find one worth telling about, before he foists another story on the world. It's a pity to see such talent go to waist. I would have given the book a better rating, anyway, but unfortunately read the preface. In Irving's rambling introduction, he says he asked his son to review it for him, though he admitted a few qualms about having a 12-year old go through this manuscript. Mostly, though, he was afraid the boy might not like the thing. If Irving had confessed to offering his son a glass of carcinogenic chemicals, or even a cigarette, I hope people would be troubled. Apparently it's no big deal, though, if you poison a child's mind with images of matings with old prostitutes, wife-swapping, and children coming in on their mother giving oral sex to one of her students. This strikes me as a form of child-abuse.
Rating:
Summary: In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
Review: I want to be John Irving because there is no greater writer today. Where does he get his ideas???? Garp is the son of Jenny, a nurse who has sex just one time with a dying technical seargeant (TS Garp) and names her son after him. She goes on to become a famous feminist author and raises her son amongst all her feminist friends. Garp is a bit of a smart and carnal Forrest Gump in all of his adventures. The World According to Garp traces Garp's entire life from childhood, to a stint in Vienna when he decides he wants to learn to be a writer, and throughout his marriage to Helen, whom he has known since his teenaged years. This book twists through Garp's life, bringing back characters who have a lasting impact on the story's development till everyone is seen through to their own fate.
Rating:
Summary: A Twisted Fairytale
Review: Throughout The World According to Garp, youíll find yourself laughing at the worst times. In the first few pages, when Jenny Fields, the very anti-male and anti-lust mother of T.S. Garp, slices a soldier's arm with a scalpel, you laugh, when you should be disgusted. Irving integrates humor, as well as pain, grief, and anger, at the most catastrophic moments of rape, death, and murder. Irving explains his sense of humor in the voice of Garp, a novelist much like Irving, stating, "I have never understood why serious and funny are thought to be opposites. It is simply a truthful contradiction to me that people's problems are often funny and that the people are often and nonetheless sad." Not only does Irving do a great job of incorporating humor throughout the novel, he does an excellent job of fitting every character and incidence into his and Garp's stories, however outrageous and unrealistic they might seem. Each character and action is perfectly and amazingly built-in into the plot line. Even the stories written by Garp are included into the novel perfectly. So many parallel ideas, characters, and plots can be drawn from Irving's and Garp's writing. Both writers hit you with harsh reality after harsh reality and don't attempt to hide the pain; yet you'll never want to put the book down. Irving grabs your attention right from the start and never lets it go. Even after the last page, youíll wish there was more. The World According to Garp isn't a "happily ever after" story. It is a fairytale of the constant and growing love of a family that is victim to countless of tragic, yet humorous catastrophes.
Rating:
Summary: Intriguing and addictive
Review: This book was probably one of the most clever and ironically constructed pieces of modern, realist literature I've ever read. I had no idea what to expect when I opened the book, but my the time I finished, I didn't want it to end. I even found the 'novels' within the novel to be rich in texture and excellent for further dicussion within the book. All of the characters were well constructed and developed, and Irving's afterword answered my question of the novel's autobiographical nature. This is my first Irving novel, and I can't wait to start another one!
Rating: 
Summary: Sad and contradictory
Review: It is a very sad and contradictory book, for example Garp doesn't let the drivers go fast in his living address for the safety of his kids, but when he is coming home, before he arrives turns off the car lights and keeps driving killing one of his children, this is safe? let's ask to his son.
The writer writes and writes until everybody is dead some by the age and some by an accident.
Rating:
Summary: Even better the second time around.
Review: I first read Garp in 1982, when I was twenty-three. I remembered it being superb - perhaps the first book I'd ever read that was so hilarious and painfully sad at the same time. Just finished it again, and now, even more than nineteen years ago, I kept shouting in my head, "NO! Don't let it happen to Walt!" (My own two boys, exactly the same age as Duncan and Walt, were playing, fighting, and just being boys, in the next room.) Feeling like a cannon ball had just gone through my stomach, I just wanted to go in and hug my kids, but they'd a-thunk their dad was certifiably wacko. Alternately, I plowed through the book for another four hours. Next morning, rushing the kids off to school, I was exhausted, and unfortunately snapped at the very boys I love so much. THANKS A LOT, Mr. Irving!!! So reread Garp. You'll be amazed at the number of subtle foreshadowings Irving has packed into this gem.
Rating: 
Summary: A wonderful adventure
Review: The World According to Garp is a wonderful adventure into the life of a man named T.S. Garp, named after his father, Technical Sergeant Garp in World War II. Garp's life begins oddly, with no father and a very strange but loving mother. Mrs. Fields, a nurse at the Steering School for Boys, loves her son more than anything in the world. She is a die-hard feminist and her book, Sexual Suspect, sounds like something a young Susan B. Anthony might have written. She ends up being killed when supporting another feminist for governer by a man who hates feminism. Garp has a lot of love to give and many people to give it to. Her mother, wife, kids, and mistresses all recieve much love from him. Although his life is not perfect, he still lives it to the fullest with his motto, "In the world according to Garp, the world is full of terminal cases."
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