- Paperback: 656 pages
- Publisher: Vintage Canada; Vintage Canada ed., 2001 edition (May 1 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0676974031
- ISBN-13: 978-0676974034
- Product Dimensions: 20.3 x 14 x 3.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 499 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (913 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #118,053 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon.com
Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.
The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. --Tim Appelo --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Irving's storytelling skills have gone seriously astray in this contrived, preachy, tedious tale of the eponymous Owen Meany, a latter-day prophet and Christ-like figure who dies a martyr after having inspired true Christian belief in the narrator, Johnny Wheelwright. The boys grow up close friends in a small New Hampshire town, where Owen's loutish parents own a quarry and where the fatherless Johnny, whose beloved mother never reveals the secret of his paternity, becomes an orphan at age 11 when a foul ball hit by Owen in a Little League game strikes his mother on the head, killing her instantly. The tragedy notwithstanding, Owen and Johnny cleave to a friendship sealed when Owen uses desperate means to keep Johnny from going to Vietnam, and brought to its apotheosis when Johnny is present at the death Owen has seen prefigured in a vision. Despite the overworked theme of a boy's best friend causing his mother's injury or death (one thinks immediately of Robertson Davies and Nancy Willard), the plot might have been workable had not Irving made Owen a caricature: Owen is, all his life, so tiny he can be lifted with one hand; he is "mortally cute," and he has a "cartoon voice" because he must shout through his nose, which Irving conveys by printing all of Owen's dialogue in capital lettersan irritating device that immediately sets the reader's teeth on edge. Then too, the author's portentously dramatic foreshadowing, which has worked well in his previous books, is here sadly overdone and excessively melodramatic. On the plus side, Irving is convincing in his appraisal of the tragedy of Vietnam and in his religious philosophizing, in which he distinguishes the true elements of faith. But that is not enough to save the meandering narrative. Owen is not the only one to hit a foul ball in this novel, which is too "mortally cute" for its own good. BOMC main selection.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
John Irving and his world,
By Waddleforth (Cambodia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Prayer for Owen Meany (Mass Market Paperback)
A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY is a fascinating book, but it won't be for everyone. Irving has indeed created an odd couple of characters: Owen Meany, the dwarfish youth with high-pitched voice of stunning self-importance that wavers between arrogance one moment and self-sacrificial lamb of God the next, and his sidekick Johnny Wheelwright, illegitimate child of a striking, freespirited woman soon killed off by a baseball Owen accidentally slams across the baseball field during a Little League game to hit its killing blow against her temple. Not that this would destroy the odd friendship of these two. Indeed, it bonds them for life.
As for Owen, he doesn't believe in accidents, especially not this one. What transpires through the remainder of the story, tracing the lives of these two from children into adulthood, is a complex weave of seeming circumstance into eventual climactic conclusion that rather neatly ties many loose threads together into a tight knot. Owen has foreseen his own death by a visionary dream, and he never doubts, at least not until the final days of his life, that this dream is the beacon guiding him home (home being, for Owen, heaven for those who would enter through the gates of martyrdom). In the process of these two strange lives, topics of destiny and fate, religion, American politics and foreign policy, various rites of passage from childhood into adulthood, and other miscellaneous lighter and deeper issues are undertaken. These, too, all come together into the neat knot at the book's end. The only other novel that came together this way for me (and everyone else) was THE BARK OF THE DOGWOOD with its equally strange characters and situations. Irving is a quality writer. But, although I have yet to read his other works, I suspect this one is not his best. The ideas he undertakes are fascinating enough, yet I found myself unmoved by either Owen's fate or Johnny's somewhat victimized standing by. Still, I would recommend A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY along with the wonderful BARK OF THE DOGWOOD as they are both stellar and first rate---really top drawer, both. If you like to laugh and cry, try these books.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Truly terribly written and even worse story line,
By Devon Mildren (Exeter, NH) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Prayer for Owen Meany (Mass Market Paperback)
This book is not at all what I expected from John Irving. Not only is the story weak, it is truly insipid and carries on and on with vulgar and unrelated information for pages and pages. The book focuses on this supposedly faithful Owen Meany, who is a complete hipocrite, and works completely against the them of faith that is supposed to be put forth. I truly have never found a more mediocre and badly written story with as irritating a character as Owen Meany and his rediculuously pathetic friend who narrates the story. How John Irving of all people manages to come up with the out there story line is incomprehensible - it seems as if he couldn't decide what type of story he wanted to write. The only thing that is more amazing than that an excellent writer could write such basic level trash is that people could actually enjoy it. Save yourself and read one of his other books.
1.0 out of 5 stars
1-star rating is even too much,
This review is from: A Prayer for Owen Meany (Mass Market Paperback)
This book, despite all the acclaim it's received, is nothing but trash. Irving writes with a forced and awkward hand - there is no fluidity in this novel. It is incoherent and utterly ridiculous. The reader experiences no satisfaction at the end of the book, not even considering the untimely demise of the irritating Meany boy. Ugh, if burning books weren't frowned upon, guess which one would be roasting right now? Go on, guess.
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