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Summary: Memorable Scences, Deep Characterization, Great Setting
Review: What more could a contemporary reader want? There was suspense, background, adultry, evil sex, death, and pain. All the elements of an entertaining read are in this book.I must say the characters are some of the best I've read. Garp WAS a weird dad, and would have made a cute husband. Helen was an intelligent, blunt, bookish, but also sexy, alluring, and dominant woman. The children were the best of all, how Duncan and Walt were instructed by their father to say "He's Still underwater" on the count of three, then taking that up for their own good use. I love the characters, most of all I love this book.
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Summary: One of the ten best books I've ever read!
Review: I conducted a survey in my newsletter regarding the best book of the 1980s. Since those surveyed could choose anything, it's surprising that ANY book got more than one vote. Out of 25 respondents, four chose GARP. Even more amazing, the book came out in the 1970s, but it stuck with people like nothing else. Amazing book! A+++
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Summary: One of the best books I have ever read.
Review: This was such a great book, i couldn't put it down. I read it in one sitting. There were countless times that I laughed right out loud. - FJM from Boston
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Summary: To know Garp is to love Garp
Review: I have read Garp about 8 times. Each time I enter Garp's world, I come away with a new truth. Garp's assertion that"life is an x-rated soap opera" is apt and telling.It takes Irving a full chapter after the accident to acknowledge Walt's death, and then by Garp's one sentence "I misth Walt." Like real life, the death of a loved one is something to deny and in the end, can only be stated in one handicapped sentence. Garp's life is our life; the tears we shed for Walt are our own.
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Summary: wonderfully eccentric!!
Review: i may not be a writer, or a student of literature, or anything else related to all these other "reviewers", but i am an avid reader. John Irving has had me spellbound since i picked up A Prayer For Owen Meany years ago, for a project in high school. i've gobbled up everything else he's written....only to find myself wishing that he'd publish something else soon!! The World According to Garp was such fun to read, although i won't hesitate to say a little shocking, at times...i lost and regained my respect (and hope) for Garp several times throughout the novel, but i was absolutely thrilled with the ending...this book was excellent, just one step behind A Prayer For Owen Meany...
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Summary: Another male-chauvinist masquerading as sympathetic
Review: Come on. Garp can fool around with college-age babysitters and Alice, but when Helen has an affair, she looses Walt and Duncan looses his eye. That was almost enough to make me burn this book. I have to admit I'm getting quite tired (after four Irving books) of the repeated themes...male obsession with sex, private boys schools, Viennese prostitutes, and flat female characters. For someone who's so popular, you'd think he could tell an original story once in a while. Don't waste your time.
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Summary: One of the best I can ever remember reading
Review: What is my measure of a great book? One that completely takes over your world while you are reading it. One that screams, "DON'T YOU DARE SET ME DOWN!" One that makes you feel that you know it's characters so well, you could easily fit into the story yourself. One that when you finish it, you have a deep sense of loss that you will never encounter these great characters again. And you immediately begin to reread the book, just to keep them in your life a bit longer. There have only been two that I can say fit into this characterization for me. Those are: To Kill a Mockingbird, and The World According to Garp! Read it and judge for yourself. You will be amazed!!
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Summary: Garp: A Hilarious and Ironic Tale
Review: First of all, let me just state that John Irving is the best author alive today. His books, I am certain, will be reguarded as classics for years to come. A Prayer for Owen was a book of symbolism and irony.. but Garp was a book of irony, plain irony. I loved the book. I thought that the characters were extremely well-developed, the story was clear and concise, and the book was significant and impacting.
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Summary: Garp is fresh, relevant and brilliant, even after 11 years!!
Review: Not being an ardent reader, I silently grimaced at the sheer weight of the book I was being encouraged to read. The thought of trudging through the seemingly endless reams of text, did not appeal to me. Garp, is simply a magical description, analysis and evaluation of life. For the entire time I lived and breathed Garp, and was stunned at way Irving manages to portray every human emotion in a single text...in fact this is more than text this is life presented brillantly. Everyone should read this book.
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Summary: A Loss of Innocence?
Review: The World According to Garp, I think, was a book of its time. Like Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run or The Beatles Sgt Peppers', it captured a feeling in the community, particularly the baby boomers, which a lot of people then understood and related to. Unfortunately, with time, this understanding has become less than clear to ensuing generations. It was released in the mid to late 1070s (1978 I think) when the baby boomers were all hitting 30 and starting to slow down, starting to think they needed some literary icon of their own generation to look to, the way they had looked to the Beatles, Stones and Rolling Stone magazine etc when they were teenagers. Remember, Salinger, Keroac, Kesey, Thompson etc were all born pre-WWII. The most peculiar (to younger readers) element of this novel must be the Ellen Jamesians, a metaphor I think, for the fanatics that dominated the society, politics and news of the 1970s - everything from disco mania to Patty Hearst's terrorist group, to the student killings at Kent State, to all the other violent terrorist acts of that decade. All had their genesis in the freedom of expression realised by the baby boomers in the 1960s and the frustration and anger that came with the realisation that society being what it is, this freedom had nowhere to go. (TANGENT: that freedom of expression was always there, it was just that these were the first kids to see themselves on TV, the first fruits of the first real middle class America had known, and they thought their future would be different to that of their parents because their youth had been) So, the anger poured out against segregation and Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s had nowhere to go once Nixon resigned and Saigon fell. It started moving into social issues like feminism and political freedom and turned what were logical idealistic movements into often extreme and violent ones. That is the reason for the part about Garp meeting Ellen James and realising he had been right all along about her view of the fanatics who bannered themselves with her name. The Ellen Jamesians mutilated themselves, symbolism, I think, for what happens to all extreme groups - they fall because the anger cannot be maintained and they crumble from self inflicted wounds. While the Ellen Jamesian movement did not crumble in Garp, I think Irving hinted at this inevitability through the sheer lunacy of their cause and their actions - against which Garp provided a voice of reason. Reason is always floored by extreme views - hence the book's climax. John Irving is a hippie and a romantic. He believes in true love, intertwining lives and devotion which sometimes borders on obsession. In light of this, Garp is really about loss of love and the fear that eventually that loss must be suffered, either physically or emotionally by us all. In effect it was a loss of innocence novel for baby boomers, by a baby boomer.
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