Rating: 
Summary: So much to think about
Review: I know how popular this book is and was pushed with earnest by my husband to read one of his more memorable high school readings. I was very cautious to not automatically fall in love with the book and to read it without bias. I read it as though I knew nothing about it. (I had, however, seen Simon Birch and let the visual characters from the film fit the role of the characters in the book - they just seemed made for the part).I do have to agree with the review written on 4/29/01 by A reader from Northeast PA. He/she is right on in their description about the formatting of the story, the play on your emotions and yes, I hate to use the word but the manipulation. It's there. You fall right into the trap. There are more themes in this book than most I have read. Its teeming with them. The most obvious is faith. But if you're looking for a story to coincide with your spiritual beliefs, the chances are pretty good this is not the book for you. I agreed with a lot of it, I disagreed with a lot of it. I'm one who is very against the war of the denominations and I felt this book just perpetuated the whole mess. I was both pleased and disappointed with the representation of the different religious leaders in the book. But hey, it's often the truth I suppose (I guess I'm just waiting for the day all the good pastors and priests out there get their due and have to stop answering for all their mediocre or just flat out immoral colleagues). Despite knowing my emotions were being toyed with at the end, despite all the coincidences falling into place so easily that it was very contrived, despite having the majority of the symbolism blatantly explained to me so that I didn't even get the satisfaction of figuring it out on my own, despite the religious inadequacies - this book was still extremely good. There were a lot of surprises. Things I did not see coming and suddenly, there they were. Hitting you like a ton of bricks. I appreciate a writer who can surprise me. In that sense, he was not at all contrived. I loved the character of Owen Meany. I wanted him to be real. I wanted this world to have a person just like him because surely, he would've made a vast improvement...even if only in a small town. He is an original character. Have you read of any like him before or since? He's precious. Not cute. Not adorable. Precious. He's what we all want to be - sure of what we believe and ready to die for it. He has the courage that most of us not only lack but cannot even fathom. I don't care if I was manipulated into loving this character. Perhaps that's what makes Irving so impressive a writer - despite knowing I was being manipulated to love Owen - I decided to forgo my act of rebellion and allow myself to love him - because he was that special.
Rating: 
Summary: I'm not a big fiction reader....
Review: but this was one of the greatest books i have ever read. the plot is so well thought and the characters are so engaging and quickly loved. Thank you to John Irving for bringing Owen Meany to life.
Rating:
Summary: Top 5 for any list
Review: Finally a witty, clever, and captivating book. I must admit, that I had not previously read a John Irving book, nor had I seen any of his movies (Give me a break, I still haven't seen any Star Wars movies either). This is now one of my all time favorite books and I am a huge John Irving fan. I finished all 600+ pages in less than a week, after the first chapter I knew I would be reading this book again. I immediately had to let one of my friends borrow it and she too is enjoying it as much as I did and she has read some of Irving's other pieces and she saw the movie 'The World According to Garp'. She said this is really different from other things he has written other than the fact he likes to use New Hampshire as his setting. I like how Irving mixes themes, interjects history, and tells a story to which everyone can relate.
Rating:
Summary: Best book ever
Review: This is the best book i've ever read. I'm more into non-fiction book but this is the fiction book i've liked the most. Read it!
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Book!!!
Review: A Prayer for Owen Meany was one of the best books I have read in a long time. I had watched the movie "Simon Birch," which was based on A Prayer for Owen Meany, before I read the book. I had enjoyed Simon Birch very much and was a bit skeptical about reading the book. Owen Meany and Simon Birch are very different. The makers of the movie changed the story drastically in order to save on time, content, etc. Although the book and the movie are very different, they are BOTH wonderful! I found that I liked A Prayer for Owen Meany, better than I liked the movie. For those of you who enjoyed Simon Birch, give Owen Meany a try, I'm sure you will like the differences.
Rating:
Summary: Why get so defensive?
Review: As if often the case with any text having even the faintest association with the subject of God, I see some readers are acting in accordance with the stereotypes assigned to them. One reviewer here mentioned something about (and I paraphrase, here) "only those who believe in God would enjoy this drivel". Lighten up. It's a book. It seems even Atheists hate to have their beliefs challenged. HELLO, even the characters WITH faith in God are challenged in this book. Isn't that sort of the point? I think this book treats faith (or lack thereof) very fairly. I personally don't belong to any specific religion and my faith in any sort of god is ambiguous at best, but I didn't at all feel that this was a book speaking only to those with faith in God. I was truly moved by this book. No, I wasn't surprised by the end, as some were. I feel the book prepares us for the very twists and turns that some readers felt surprised by. That doesn't mean I was disappointed. I don't need to be surprised by anything to enjoy a book. The characters were well-developed (some readers fail to realize that the narrator is supposed to be rather two-dimensional. He is, after all, a "Joseph"). Don't let the subject matter scare you off. I almost did, as I don't particularly like to read about faith or religion or God or any of that, but I'm really grateful to have come across this beautiful book. John Irving is a master at smacking you in the face with a line so hard it can bring instant tears to your eyes.
Rating:
Summary: great storytelling, mythical themes
Review: It is a compelling, intoxicating idea, that one's life has purpose -- and such a specific purpose. Terrible Destiny. I would define tragedy as the destruction of potential -- something that could be so good or could do good or someone who could be so great falling, dying, being destroyed. It's not just failure, it's failure on a grand and bohemoth scale. It's a grand fall from spectacular heights. In that case, I would call A Prayer for Owen Meaney a modern day tragedy.
Owen's life parallels the life of Christ -- not just in the immaculate conception (which seemed kind of hokey to me) or the sacrificial death, but in the way that from very young he is a leader, the center and mover of everything. It says at one point that special light always shone on him. He is the Voice -- the voice of the people. He grows up struggling against the authority of the headmaster, and it is a struggle he wins by losing. He is loved by everyone but even those to whom he is closest do not understand his calling, his destiny. And I guess the end result is what would've happened to Christ's followers had there been no resurrection: severe scarring and bitterness, a wound they cannot overcome. Hester turns her wound into "success" through angry music, John basically does nothing but let his pain eat him alive.
My biggest complaint with the novel is about the personality of John. Or, more accurately, the lack of it. He is sidekick to the extreme -- a spectator to Owen's story, to the point where you have to wonder how this bland milktoast could be the best friend of someone as provocative and exciting as Owen Meaney. Yet the author seems to go to great effort to make him a nothing, a nobody -- from the symbolic "Joseph" role in the nativity to complete sexual failure as a teenager to his suspected status as a "nonpracticing homosexual" as an adult. He says at the funeral "something inside me was missing, and that something was Owen." So this isn't just a weakness in the writing -- poor characterization -- it's intentional, a choice made by the author to make the narrator a nobody. Why? I don't know why. It could be a quick fix -- write a 500 page book then have an editor or reader tell you that the narrator needs more personality, and it's much much easier to go back and insert here and there hints that he's not supposed to have any personality than it is to go back and do the massive rewrite that would be necessary to develop his character. So is it Irving being lazy? Or is it there some reason he's a nobody, some reason I just don't see?
I think the biggest challenge in taking on a novel like this -- or at least like the second half -- is the tension tha t has to be maintained to keep the reader reading. You know what's going to happen, it's just a matter of how; it's just the mechanics of it. The author has to play the delay just right -- if it happens too fast, you lose the magnitude of the ending, you lose the tragic sense. And if the author dawdles and hesitates too much, the reader loses patience and skips to the end. I think that Irving plays this balance fairly well, but not perfectly -- there were points when I was tempted to skip to the end. The novel may be about fifty pages too long.
I was intrigued enough by the historical setting of the novel to research the Vietnam War on my own. I borrowed a bazillion-hour-long documentary on Vietnam from the library and am working my way through it.
I don't know what to make of the religion here. You certainly can't deny that it's there and a major theme through the novel, but it doesn't take on familiar forms. Doubt and faith are the central issues. Owen says "faith" a lot, and it seems mostly to mean believing that nothing happens by accident. Not exactly a conventional understanding; not exactly "belief in things hoped for; being certain of what is unseen." The pastor says that "doubt is the essence of faith" which I don't agree with(I'm more comfortable with a variant a la Kathleen Norris: the opposite of faith is not doubt but fear.) And while he is an admirable character through most of the novel, by the end he seems weak, destroyed by his doubt. Narrator says something about this. The narrator (Johnny) believes in God only after Owen's "prophecies" about himself comes true. So the existence of God is proven because things happen for a reason, as Owen always believed. It doesn't matter that the proving incident is tragic; this is refreshing as we don't get that old "I can't believe in a God who..." line that essentially sets us up as judges over God, the punishment we dole out being our own lack of belief. As if existence has anything to do with belief, or conduct. Instead, God exists and does what He wants for His own reasons. The problem being that it doesn't seem to matter that God exists, no seeking after Him or letting his existence affect the way life is lived. There is no following, there is only acknowledging. Unless you're chosen like Owen Meaney, God exists but is unknowable and basically has nothing to do with your or anyone's life. Problematic; if God has nothing to do with life down here then why would he bother to choose and use Owen, or Jesus? (Owen says that Jesus was "used".) But that's an unanswerable question, at least on the terms of the book -- because God does things for his own reasons, which are unfathomable to us.
The politics are memorable and resound with me; that could be just my anti-Americanism resounding with the narrator's. Two voices do not truth make. Yet I do believe that Americans have little sense of history, which amounts to little corporate memory. Also that we have a screwed up sense of morality, especially public morality, if we have any sense of that at all. Things two -- history and morality -- could be and probably are connected. I especially like what Owen says about Marilyn Monroe being like America and about televangelists being the future politicians.
Rating:
Summary: Unique, intelligent, and heartwarming
Review: I highly recommmend "A Prayer for Owen Meany" by John Irving. If you like to have ideas about religion, faith, and friendship presented to you in ways you never considered, then this book is for you. If you want a read that explores romance, family, and, again, friendship while thoroughly entertaining you, then buy this book. John Irving's characters are vivid and jump off the page. There's definitely a reason this book is on many must-read lists.
Rating:
Summary: A Favorite for Random Reading
Review: In A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANEY, John Irving never denigrates or insults. He doesn't leave you with unopposed ideas. Rather, he presents a complete picture of human nature - the pluses and the negatives. And so he perhaps inspires us to look for the same. There is an honoring of human possibilities in his writing that makes for rewarding reading. Along with William Faulkner he seems to believe that man will not only endure, he will prevail.
Rating:
Summary: Irving's Best
Review: Comedy and tragedy masterfully interwoven into a beautiful book!I laughed out loud (while on a plane, actually, and received some funny books). I cried more than once. It's a wonderful thing when a book can feel so real, when the characters can touch you so deeply. A definite must read - in fact, you'll want to read it more than once!
|
