Word: garp
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...those who feel. I hope you'll agree with me that Horace Walpole somewhat simplifies the world by saying this. Surely both of us think and feel; in regard to what's comic and what's tragic, Mrs. Poole, the world is all mixed up. -Garp...
...Poole was the Findlay, Ohio, housewife who wrote T.S. Garp to complain that his books made fun of people's troubles. Win Berry's son John will receive no such mail. He lives almost entirely in his family. His preparation for life is largely symbolic; as a jogger and weight lifter, he has the strength and endurance to repel invaders and shoulder his relatives' burdens. Characteristically, he marries the most imaginatively troubled woman in the book, a rape victim who spends many angry years in a bear suit as a bouncer at a brothel...
Unreal? Naturally. Bizarre? Of course. Irving takes considerable pleasure in bucking the normal expectations of an audience. The prevailing taste of most contemporary readers is for realism, especially when the technique applies to incredible romances and hollow documentary fiction. Garp proved that there was a large unfulfilled appetite for imaginative literature-for the athletically contorted novel that, nevertheless, rings emotionally and psychologically true...
Hotel New Hampshire should continue to appease that hunger, even though its first-person narrative precludes the life-to-death cycle that made T.S. Garp so overtly heroic. John Berry's story is not resolved in violent, dramatic action but in a quiet balancing of sorrow and hope. It is a difficult act, and it is not faultless. The dazzling characterizations and sense of American place in the first part of the novel tend to get scuffed in transit...
...snappish dog was unnecessary in the days before Garp. But after his smashing success, Irving's 19th century converted red barn became a target for autograph seekers and scraggly youths offering to do odd jobs for a chance to receive Garpian wisdom at the feet of their reluctant guru. In fact, before Irving's rugged head was known to the nation, the author was a Putney person who did advertise...