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“Have you ever read anything like that?” I asked her.

“Sure,” she said. “In The Cider House Rules.”

I had plagiarized myself. I went to find the source—my description of the dying orphan Fuzzy Stone. “In the daylight Fuzzy seemed almost transparent, as if—if you held him up to a bright enough source of light—you could see right through him, see all his frail organs working to save him.”

In retrospect, I wouldn’t change a word in either sentence. I conclude that repetition is the necessary concomitant of having anything worthwhile to say.

What was my Vietnam experience? readers of A Prayer for Owen Meany ask. I was married and had my first child when I was still in college. I went from 2-S, a student deferment, to 3-A, married-with-child. I was virtually ineligible for the draft. (I might as well have cut off my trigger finger.) This effectively removed me from my generation; I stood apart and watched. My friends, in their late teens and early twenties, faced my generation’s most agonizing decision: go to Vietnam or do something drastic in order not to go there.

My eldest son, Colin, spared me the decision, although I wouldn’t have agonized over it. I would have gone. Not because I believed in the war—on more than one occasion, I demonstrated against it. And not because I felt an obligation to my country—not then, not in the case of that war. But I would have gone to Vietnam for worse reasons—namely, because I knew I wanted to be a writer and I was curious to see and be in a war.

Before I was married and had a child, I’d even enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. I wouldn’t have gone to Vietnam just because I was drafted; I’d already signed up. But it just wasn’t to be.

As for Vietnam, and all the rest, I take Johnny Wheelwright’s view of the 1960s—“precious little irony.” And I take Owen Meany’s view of television; it seems even truer now. Much of the self-seriousness and lunacy in the world is, in Owen’s words, “MADE FOR TELEVISION.”

Twelve years later, this observation is taken to greater extremes in The Fourth Hand; yet in A Prayer for Owen Meany, the death of Johnny’s grandmother is a precursor to the vacuousness of what’s on television today. “The night she died, Dan found her propped up in her hospital bed; she appeared to have fallen asleep with the TV on and with the remote-control device held in her hand in such a way that the channels kept changing. But she was dead, not asleep, and her cold thumb had simply attached itself to the button that restlessly roamed the channels—looking for something good.”

At the time, in 1989, it seemed a fairly unusual way to die. Nowadays, I suspect, more and more people are dropping off that way. And we’re still looking for something good on television. We won’t find it. There’s precious little on TV that can keep us awake or alive.

Ever the prophet, Owen Meany was right about television, too.

Read on

* * *

More from John Irving

SETTING FREE THE BEARS

It is 1967 and two Viennese university students want to liberate the Vienna Zoo, as was done after World War II. But their good intentions have both comic and gruesome consequences, in this first novel written by a twenty-five-year-old John Irving, already a master storyteller.

THE WATER-METHOD MAN

The main character of John Irving’s second novel, written when the author was twenty-nine, is a perpetual graduate student with a birth defect in his urinary tract—and a man on the threshold of committing himself t

o a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first....

“Three or four times as funny as most novels.”

—The New Yorker

THE 158-POUND MARRIAGE

The darker vision and sexual ambiguities of this erotic, ironic tale about a ménage à quatre in a New England university town foreshadow those of The World According to Garp; but this very trim and precise novel is a marked departure from the author’s generally robust, boisterous style. Though Mr. Irving’s cool eye spares none of his foursome, he writes with genuine compassion for the sexual tests and illusions they perpetrate on one another; but the sexual intrigue among them demonstrates how even the kind can be ungenerous, and even the well intentioned, destructive.

“Irving looks cunningly beyond the eye-catching gyrations of the mating dance to the morning-after implications.”

—Washington Post

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP

This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields—a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes—even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with “lunacy and sorrow”; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries—with more than ten million copies in print—this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”

“The most powerful and profound novel about women written by a man in our generation.... Like all extraordinary books, Garp defies synopsis.... A marvelous, important, permanent novel by a serious artist of remarkable powers.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE