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Book Home  Books Information The World According to Garp
The World According to Garp
The World According to Garp is a novel by John Irving.
Published in 1978, the book was a bestseller for years; Irving has
subsequently become one of the most "bankable" modern American
novelists.
The story deals with Garp, the son of a ball-turret
gunner who was effectively reduced to a mental vegetable by a piece
of shrapnel which pierced his head; his mother, Jenny Fields, is a
strong-willed nurse who wants a child but not a husband (and has no
interest in sex except as a means to the end of having a child), and
so rapes the bedridden Technical Sergeant Garp to impregnate herself.
Her parents are both wealthy and shocked; Garp's mother raises Garp
without their support, taking a position at a boys' school. She becomes
a well-known feminist speaker after publishing an auto-biography called
A Sexual Suspect (referring to the general assessment of her as an
unwed mother). Meanwhile Garp becomes interested in wrestling, sex,
and writing: three topics which his mother seems to have a rudimentary
and unemotional interest in.
The book contains some elements that appear in almost
all John Irving novels: bears, wrestling, Vienna and a complex Dickensian
plot that spans the protagonist's whole life.
The novel was adapted by Steve Tesich into a screenplay
for a 1982 movie directed by George Roy Hill and starring Robin Williams
as Garp. Glenn Close played Fields, and John Lithgow was featured
as Roberta Muldoon, a transsexual former football player.
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