Irving's characters will stay alive for years to come ― CHICAGO TRIBUNE fascinatingly unique ― NEW YORK TIMESĪ social tragi-comedy of such velocity that it reads rather like a domestic sequel to Catch-22 ― OBSERVERĪ brilliant panoply of current attitudes toward sex, marriage and parenthood, the feminist movement and - above all - the concept of delineated sexual roles. The World According to Garp is a huge narrative full of complex emotional rollercoasters typical of a writer's life. a marvellous, important, permanent novel by a serious artist of remarkable powers ― CHICAGO TIMESĪ wonderful novel, full of energy and art, at once funny and heartbreaking.

Like all extraordinary books, Garp defies synopsis. The most powerful and profound novel about women written by a man in our generation. Like all great works of art, Irving's novel seems always to have been there, a diamond sleeping in the dark, chipped out at last for our enrichment and delight.As approachable as it is brilliant, Garp pulses with vital energy ― COSMOPOLITAN Garp, struggling writer and illegitimate son of Jenny Fields - an unlikely feminist heroine ahead of her time.īeautifully written, THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP is a powerfully compelling and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation.Ībsolutely extraordinary.a roller-coaster ride that leaves one breathless, exhausted, elated and tearful ― LA TIMES 'A wonderful novel, full of energy and art, at once funny and heartbreaking.terrific' WASHINGTON POSTĪnniversary edition with a new afterword from the author.Ī worldwide bestseller since its publication, Irving's classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T. The masochistic gifted-victim game has been played in recent American writing on just about every conceivable level, but Irving's novel is still something special: he created a whole hideous and deformed women's political group (the Ellen Jamesians) in order to have his author-hero, his alter ego, destroyed by it, and the film is faithful to Irving's 'vision.A masterpiece from one of the great contemporary American writers. If you listen to what Garp (Robin Williams) says, the movie is about love of family if you look at what happens, though, it's a castration fantasy. Tongues, ears, penises, eyes, lives-everybody on the screen is losing something. This isn't necessarily bad-Hill's pastel, detached, and generally meaningless comedy may, in some ways, be preferable to the baroque apparatus that Irving constructed-but in recounting the book's key incidents Hill and Tesich lay bare the pattern of mutilations in the plot. Pauline Kael gave this movie a middling review: 'The movie version of John Irving's novel, directed by George Roy Hill, from a script by Steve Tesich, has no center it's a simple series of vignettes, spanning Garp's life from his beginning to his end.

Novel the world according to garp