Books in Brief: The World According to Garp

The World According to Garp, by John Irving (Dutton, 437 pp., $10.95; paper, $2.75). The World According to Garp is the work of an extravagant imagination. It is also richly comic, its dialogue and scenes sometimes filled with a riotous energy worthy of the Marx Brothers. Yet for all its comic affection (and Irving does care about his characters), The World According to Garp is no slapstick celebration. Irving’s special gift is narration, not style; the story moves along captivatingly despite some unremarkable language. T. S. Garp is the son of a compassionate nurse and a terminally ill tail-gunner. Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields, writes a book which makes her a feminist heroine, a kind of Betty Friedan in white. Garp has trouble all his life dealing with feminists, and Irving plumbs the paradoxes of feminism for some hilarious satire (for example, one of Jenny’s adorers is Roberta, nee Robert, a huge transsexual who was once a tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles). Garp is also a writer —who marries, sires and loves his children, endures great and inexplicable violence, cooks marvelous spaghetti sauce, and dies. The world according to Irving is comic, but not very funny; it is existentialism with a smile. Tenuous happiness exists with extreme and random pain. “In the world according to Garp,” Irving writes, “we are all terminal cases.”