Word: garp
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...WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving; Dutton; 437pages...
...Garp, the writer-hero of The World According to Garp, is bearlike. He is short, powerfully built, a former schoolboy wrestler, a man dedicated to physical fitness, writing fiction, cooking and keeping house while his wife teaches literature to arrogant, randy college students. Garp is also fiercely protective of his two children: "There was so much to worry about, when worrying about children, and Garp worried so much about everything; at times, especially in these throes of insomnia, Garp thought himself to be psychologically unfit for parenthood. Then he worried about that, too, and felt all the more anxious...
Night thoughts turn to prophecy in a series of chain-reaction ironies that Irving controls with such authority that the most bizarre male sexual fear and the most terrifying parental obsession are fused in a few moments of comedy and horror. Yes, something awful happens to Garp's children; but to have one's emotions manipulated as skillfully, one would have to go back to the riding accident suffered by Tony and Brenda Last's son in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust...
...World According to Garp is a long family novel, spanning four generations and two continents, crammed with incidents, characters, feelings and craft. The components of black comedy and melodrama, pathos and tragedy, mesh effortlessly in a tale that can also be read as a commentary on art and the imagination...
...Garp himself begins in an act of highly spiced imagination. During World War II, his mother, Nurse Jenny Fields, climbs into bed with a ball-turret gunner who has been lobotomized by a piece of flak. The gunner, Technical Sergeant Garp, dies shortly afterward, leaving only the initials of rank for his son's first name. For Jenny, her one and only sexual experience is a calculated insemination consistent with her independent nature. As she writes in A Sexual Suspect, the autobiography that makes her famous, "I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone. That made...