• A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY
• by John Irving
• [rated by pbs readers as #26]
• 627 pages

I just dropped off my copy of Da Vinci Code to a friend and I already miss it! What a gloriously fun read.

Owen Meany has been a book that I have almost read a couple of times in this project and then something else captured my attention.

It is also one of my big 13 left! Mind you, I have 56 books left, having read 44 so far. But of the 56, there are 13 of them that are either 1)long or 2)complicated or 3) far from my normal reading or 4)War & Peace, which is all those things.

At any rate, I realized a while back that I needed to fold these 13 into the list at a regular pace, like every four books at most, so that I wouldn’t get all the way through this list except for three of them and then want to shoot myself trying to finish.

So Da Vinci Code was so fun and quick that I knew it was time for a big one and here’s come Owen Meany.

Check out Irving’s first words in this book.

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God: I am a Christian because of Owen

Meany.”

Whew! First paragraph! His best friend accidentally kills his mother and that starts the story. It isn’t even the point of the story! I don’t know about you guys, but there is no way I’m that deep!

At 100 pages or so in, the other amazing thing about this read is that Irving writes the way teachers want you to write. He writes properly, with a scroll of images that take you to the story and gently pull you along.

The characters are anything but stereotypical. In fact, there are very few characters and I feel that I don’t even know them that well yet! So it is that he unfolds his characters to the reader, on his terms and with his images.

There is a slight hitch for me. Though this was always the way you were supposed to write (I’m sure a writing class in college would be well served by using this book as a manual on the correct way), it feels like it belongs to a time in the past. It is from a time when we didn’t have the choices in life that we have now, when a read was celebrated by using ten images to make a point over just one. And while that is all well and good, it feels belabored to me. Tens of thousands of words to tell a story is an art form, but possibly an antiquated one.

I know there are still people who love this kind of eloquent drawing out of a beautiful story. I don’t love it, but I respect Irving’s artistry.

It should also be said that Irving could easily have made this list with Cider House Rules or Garp. That alone makes me curious as to how this rises above those two amazing books. We’ll see!

A LITTLE OVER HALF WAY DONE…

This is a hugely difficult read for me to get through, but possibly for a different reason than usual.

John Irving is a superlative writer – of the kinds of books that don’t really exist anymore. And I accept that I am one reader’s responsibility for that.

I know I’ve talked earlier about reading huge books when I was a kid. I loved having an 800-page epic to take to the oceanside, or to crawl up my grampa’s tree and read for hours. Michener, Uris, all those guys.

Now granted, I remember those books being filled to the brim with adventure. But books like this, written by writers like this, were part of that wave.

Unlike my most loyal and responsive reader of this blog, Laurie, I haven’t read his books in the past. I imagine that I would have enjoyed Cider House or Garp, maybe more than this one.

But the funny thing is – it feels too late. We are now a society where you can read and you can also be presented with the most awe-inspiring tales on film and tv that twist out into any direction you fancy. What I mean is that we have a ridiculous amount of choice in the tales we attach to. And the level of these enticements is first rate.

I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t have twenty TV series that they would still like to see and at least that many movies they haven’t gotten to yet.

To that new deep diving pool, we throw in Owen Meany. This is essentially a story of two friends coming of age over about five years. That’s it. Okay, I haven’t finished it yet and I’m prepared to be stunned. But for almost 400 of its 600+ pages, that has been it.

Is it written well? It is written beautifully. The deep dive, in this case, is the detail. Imagine that you saw something painted – maybe a wall, maybe a piece of furniture, maybe a fountain – and painted exquisitely. Every detail has been caressed to perfection. You admire

it and look at every detail of it.

Now imagine doing that for the amount of hours it takes to read this.

You wouldn’t. Life is too short to sustain an opus, beautifully written, that could be told in 400 fewer pages. I mean, as a writer in this style, Irving has sustained it. As an older reader with too many quick and pleasurable choices, it is I, as a reader, who can’t sustain it.

I will finish it. And I will be able to say I enjoyed it, for the most part. But on a spectrum where it enjoys the far sided position of detail after detail, page after page, this book could really stand to swing at least a bit towards get to the point!

DONE.

Well, what can I say? It is a masterpiece. Irving is a spectacular writer. As I first mentioned, he is the kind of writer that every writer teacher loves. He writes by the book, incorporating what you have to have to be good and then adding layers and layers on top of that.

I’m grateful for this project and having the chance to read this lovely book. Do I still feel that it is longer than people will sit and read? Absolutely. In fact, my gratitude stems from that fact that I would have put it down somewhere in my house several times and not have had the driving force to pick it back up, if it weren’t for this project.

A Prayer for Owen Meany is a long experience. In the end, I will remember my admiration for a great writer’s skills. I will remember the characters. The feeling I often have of wanting to return to a book isn’t there minutes after finishing and I know it won’t be there.

But I will always be grateful to be exposed to a lovely book with a depth and detail that I may not read again – except in another one from this project!