Kay's Bookshelf

I think the author has done a great job when it comes to the characters, as none of them is a cliche and all of them are very believable. Starting with Garp, the eternal worrier and the writer who had trouble writing because the lines between reality and fiction started to blur. Continuing to his mother, Jenny Fields, the feminist symbol who never once felt or understood lust. To Roberta Muldoon, ex-Robert and ex-Philadelphia Eagle, who sort of got the best of both worlds (knowing first hand how men think but being and acting like a woman). To Duncan, the one-eyed one-armed painter. To Bainbridge Percy nicknamed Pooh. To, last but not least, Ellen James, the young rape victim who started a whole current, becoming a symbol for desolate women everywhere (although she never approved of them).

Speaking of Ellen James, I was very shocked when I first read about the women who called themselves Ellen Jamesians — women who cut off their tongues “to protest what happened to Ellen James”, women that “must have suffered, in other ways, themselves”. To me it seemed an unspeakably horrible thing for someone to bring upon herself, regardless of their message :( I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them too though.

A quote of Garp’s that I have found interesting:

“‘If you are careful,’ Garp wrote, ‘if you use good ingredients, and you don’t take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.’”

And another one:

“To Garp, [TV's] glow looks like cancer, insidious and numbing, putting the world to sleep. Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.”

Were I to be asked to describe the plot in more detail, I will probably find it quite hard — because there aren’t that many important facts in the book. I’ll just rephrase that. There are very few, if any, outstanding facts in the book: there are so many of them important and worth mentioning that I would have trouble choosing between them. This is probably why I have found interesting the way the author put it in the afterword in my edition: show spoiler

What I liked most: The Under Toad. The way Garp’s first short story came to be (at first he knew he wanted to write about a family; then, after a while, he chose what the father does for a living; and so on). Mentions of Vienna, having been there many times myself. The epilogue.

What I liked least: The first stories Garp wrote/told half horrified half saddened me. Especially the one about the dog and the cat he tells Walt one evening. Ugh. I cannot see anything remotely beautiful in that. They almost made me hate the book.

Recommend it to? Anyone :) Although I myself liked the book somewhat less than I thought I would, I do think it’s set to become a classic and as such I recommend everyone to give it a try. With a wee bit of reserve regarding the language (explicit every now and then).

Written by the same author:
The Cider House Rules


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The characters were very well built in my opinion. Unfortunately I have found both Wally and Candy to be sort of cliche (the beautiful girl perfect in every way, torn between the love for the guy she knew since childhood and this new hero-type she just met; the beautiful guy perfect in every way, volunteering to fight for his country, presumed dead for a while but all this time kept alive by the memory of his girlfriend’s love and of his love for her), but all the others were plain great. My favorites have been by far Dr. Larch and his two nurses: all three devoting their life to doing good, to taking care of their orphans, to being “of use”, as Dr. Larch put it, all three getting older and older and frailer and frailer as the time went by but never giving up. Melony is sort of their opposite, a very destructive person, so much so that I have found her as a child quite disturbing. She used to scare me all throughout the book as I was certain she’ll end up doing some serious harm, but she sort of mellowed out at the end and I was actually glad to see her ending up happy at Lorna’s side.

I don’t know what to think about what the author has chosen to do out of Homer Wells. The reader gets the feeling at times (while Homer is living his nice apple-picking life) that he is wrong, he is wasting his life in compromising and denying his God-given talent. On one hand I like that because it makes Homer very much more human, very much more real, very much less than a character of a book. After all, so many people make bad choices, so many people with potential lived their lives in compromise and deceit, why wouldn’t such thing happen to Homer? The other hand, well, has to do with the idealist in me, the one that expects perfect things to happen at least in books if not in real life. I would have, of course, liked Homer to follow Dr. Larch’s footsteps from the very beginning. But then there would have been no book to talk about, right? :P

I have liked the way the story is somehow centered around rules, respected or broken (As Wally put it, “‘Some rules are good rules, kiddo,’ [...] ‘But some rules are just rules. You just got to break them carefully.’“). The rules (both legal and moral) about abortion, the rules written by Homer in the cider house (never read and thus never respected, people thought they were “something to do with the building’s electricity” as they were always tacked near the light switch), the rules of society, the rules the black apple pickers had between them, and, perhaps most of all, the rules Candy has once set for Homer (while in the cider house — I think these are the very rules that gave the novel its title), that “We share Angel,’ [...] ‘We both get to live with him. We get to be his family. Nobody ever moves out.’“, thus condemning Homer to a life of compromise, a life of lying to an invalid, a life of always wanting what he couldn’t have.

I think the abortion-related part has been handled quite well by Irving, as he lets the reader see both parts of the problem: not bringing unwanted children into the world versus the belief the fetus has a soul ever since conception. He does (obviously) lean towards one of the sides (and what’s more all characters agree that women should have the right to choose what’s best for them), but all in all I feel he has touched every important issue related to the matter — I liked that as I am fond of watching things from more than one angle :)

What I liked most: A moment that I was really touched by was when Candy has pregnant and was waiting to give birth at the orphanage, and everyone there was enchanted by her, especially the nurses: “we’re gonna have a wanted baby!”. It sort of tells a lot about the world they were all living in, a world where pregnancy was associated only with guilt, suffering and abandonment one way or the other.
Also, I was fascinated by Dr. Larch’s plan of reviving Fuzzy and making him a proper doctor, how detailed and complicated it was (all the correspondence Dr. Larch imagined, for once), how many years it spanned (over fifteen), how well everything was planned and how well it luckily turned out. Isn’t it interesting how easy to manipulate history is (history, who is supposed to be absolute), once someone puts his mind to it?

What I liked least: Many things were predictable but all in all it was too interesting a book to let that stand in the way of enjoying it.

Recommend it? Definitely. I find it a very well written book.

Written by the same author:
The World According to Garp

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Popularity: 3% [?]