The World According to Garp

Admittedly, when I read the description of this book, I knew it was going to be weird. I’m used to weird. Last year I read Slaughterhouse-Five and A Handmaid’s Tale, I am prepared for strange. But The World According to Garp was a whole new kind of weird.
  
When people fell from the sky and turned into animals in The Satanic Verses, it wasn’t a problem because you could tell Rushdie was using magical realism to prove a point. When Alex and his gang broke into houses and raped women in A Clockwork Orange it was disturbing but made sense in a dystopian novel. When Chief started talking about listening machines in the walls in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest it didn’t phase me because he was in an asylum at the time. But with Garp, all the characters are basically normal people but have the most messed-up lives of just about any book I have read.

The novel starts with nurse Jenny Fields, a young woman who is so practical as to have almost no emotions besides a strong maternal instinct. She decides she wants to have a baby but has no interest in men or romance, so she essentially rapes a nearly-braindead and dying young soldier in her hospital in order to impregnate herself. Weird. And things start getting more strange from there.

 She raises her son – named Technical Sergeant Garp, after what was written on his father’s dog tags – on the grounds at an all-boys school where he grows up about as normal as a kid in his circumstances can. He falls in love with his wrestling coach’s daughter, whom he eventually marries after he and his mother live for a while in Vienna, where he befriends the local prostitutes (weird). During their time in Europe Jenny writes a book about her life and becomes a famous feminist in the process. It’s a really complicated storyline so I won’t go into the whole thing, but some of the highlights include Garp and his wife dating another couple, a former pro-football player who has a sex change, a horrible car accident that causes a child to loose an eye, an assassination, a crazed stalker, women who willingly have their tongues cut out as a political statement, and a story about a bear who rides a unicycle in a hotel hallway. Just to name a few.

Honestly, it is one of the more bizarre books I’ve read – probably up there with Vonnegut’s Galapagos, where over the course of a couple hundred years all humans evolve into hairy seal-like creatures on a single island. By the end of the novel I wasn’t sure if I liked it or hated it. I felt like I was watching a ridiculous soap opera full of sex, far-fetched scenes, and ridiculous familial relationships. Things that seemed to have little impact on the story (like young Garp biting a dog that once bit him) were described in great detail, while other very important events (a certain death in the story) were tiptoed around and never fully explained.

In the end, The World According to Garp read like a fictionalized celebrity tell-all rather than a novel of literary merit. Why was this popular in the 70s? I have no idea why this book was such a big deal. I will say one thing, though: this makes the third book about characters with psychological issues on my list this year.