Books, Arts & Manners: An Intellectual Suspect

The Germans have a word for it: Edelkitsch, noble trash. Some recent fictional examples of it are Fear of Flying, The White Hotel, and The World According to Garp, John Irving’s novel falling somewhere midway between D. M. Thomas’s and Erica Jong’s. As Calvin Bedient has remarked about another Thomas, R. S., his “poems have an almost visible brilliance,” and so, too, has Irving’s magnum opus’, an intense, cute, rather labored brilliance that obscures all else—both the little that is there and the lot that pretends to be. The movie of Garp, written by Steve Tesich and directed by George Roy Hill, seems to me both more simple-minded and better than the novel. If this sounds like faint praise, it is meant so. Still, as movies go these days, it may not be all that faint after all.

Garp, as almost everyone knows—for almost everyone reads Edelkitsch, or reads enough about it to feel that he has read it—concerns well-born Jenny Fields, a nurse and fierce feminist, who wants a child but no husband, and so, during World War II, conceives by a dying ball-turret gunner, Technical Sergeant Garp, a child she names T. S. Garp. Already you can see the cutesiness of it. Even though young Garp explains to the girl he will marry that T. S. used to stand for Terribly Shy but now stands for Terribly Sexy, what reader will not associate it with T. S. Eliot? And since Garp is also Irving, the apotheosis is complete.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Featured Tags

The Germans have a word for it: Edelkitsch, noble trash. Some recent fictional examples of it are Fear of Flying, The White Hotel, and The World According to Garp, John Irving’s novel falling somewhere midway between D. M. Thomas’s and Erica Jong’s. As Calvin Bedient has remarked about another Thomas, R. S., his “poems have an almost visible brilliance,” and so, too, has Irving’s magnum opus’, an intense, cute, rather labored brilliance that obscures all else—both the little that is there and the lot that pretends to be. The movie of Garp, written by Steve Tesich and directed by George Roy Hill, seems to me both more simple-minded and better than the novel. If this sounds like faint praise, it is meant so. Still, as movies go these days, it may not be all that faint after all.

Garp, as almost everyone knows—for almost everyone reads Edelkitsch, or reads enough about it to feel that he has read it—concerns well-born Jenny Fields, a nurse and fierce feminist, who wants a child but no husband, and so, during World War II, conceives by a dying ball-turret gunner, Technical Sergeant Garp, a child she names T. S. Garp. Already you can see the cutesiness of it. Even though young Garp explains to the girl he will marry that T. S. used to stand for Terribly Shy but now stands for Terribly Sexy, what reader will not associate it with T. S. Eliot? And since Garp is also Irving, the apotheosis is complete.