“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory—but it has you!”

"If you care about something, you have to protect it - if you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it."

Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend’s mother. Owen doesn’t believe in accidents; he believes he is God’s instrument.

If you had told me, “Johann... you’re going to read this book that focuses on topics like the Vietnam War, American/Canadian politics and religion, and is centred around a young boy who believes he is God’s instrument... AND you’re going to REALLY enjoy it” I’ve have said “get the fuck outta here”- I’m not much of a politics person, nor do I enjoy reading about history, but luckily the Vietnam war is one period of history that I know a lot about (thank you, GCSE History!) so at least I could follow along!

A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of those awkward books that you had a good time with, but you wouldn’t necessarily recommend to everyone. Not everyone is gonna like those themes and not everyone enjoys a book that moves quite slowly at times. But this gal did!

Irving’s writing is beautiful. The one downside is that he reeeeally likes to hammer things home, hence this 700 page chunker. This could easily have been a couple of 100 pages shorter and still carried the same weight and resonance. One thing that surprised me though was how absolutely hilarious it was at times. Some of Owen Meany’s actions and opinions legit cracked me up! The nativity scene in particular was a highlight, it really tickled me!

Oh, and I had mentioned it in one of my stories, but every word that leaves Owen’s mouth is in capitals. Which is fine. Perfectly fine. Especially when he goes on for a few pages... *eye twitches*

Once again, I was left in tears by the end. This book is intelligent, complex and multi-layered and I was incredibly fucking impressed at how Irving stitched it all together.

Probably not for everyone, but then again, I didn’t think it would be for me and I really dug it!! 4 stars.

Some may consider this a classic. It is on the PBS "The Great American Read" list. I am afraid I did not enjoy it much. It was a chore for me to finish.

While the plot idea itself is good, and incredibly long; it is the storytelling that was an issue for me. The writing requires extreme patience, it is wandering, meandering, and long winded. The ending felt anticlimactic after expectations have went on for 600+ pages. I feel half of the pages could have been eliminated with good editing. This was my first Irving, and perhaps he just is not for me.

A long time ago, I came across a story that my grandmother recommended. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I definitely hadn’t expected to read what would become my favorite book. The story begins as many do, giving background on the area that will provide the setting for our tale, a history as reference, but quickly catches up with the main characters and the supporting cast. And we quickly learn of Johnny and Owen Meany, two friends who forge an eternal bond despite their obvious mismatches - physical, social, cultural and religious differences. And a tragic consequence of a baseball game.

GOD HAS TAKEN YOUR MOTHER. MY HANDS WERE THE INSTRUMENT. GOD HAS TAKEN MY HANDS. I AM GOD'S INSTRUMENT.

Big words for an eleven-year old who can almost sit in his friend's lap. But Owen is so self-assured that whether John believes him or not, he knows that there is something special about Owen. They all know that there is something different, but no one but Johnny knows how different - or special - Owen really is.

Through their years together, Owen grows closer to Johnny than a simple friend: He becomes a brother, an aide in the search for Johnny's unnamed father, an influence that will guide Johnny's throughout his life. From helping to search for the identity of Johnny's father to keeping him out of the Vietnam war, Owen has written the script for Johnny's life although Johnny never realizes it until the end of the story - only then does he know that Owen knew the script for his own life as well, but never revealed it.

Each action in his short life was a test to help him fulfill the one part of his destiny that he couldn't see - the final act. Johnny faithfully helps Owen in these tasks, things that he can't possibly know the reasons for. But to Owen, even Johnny's mother's death had a purpose. Everything had a purpose to Owen. Even if he was the only one to seem to know why things happened the way they did.

He had sunk the shot in under four seconds!
"YOU SEE WHAT A LITTLE FAITH CAN DO?" said Owen Meany. The brain-damaged janitor was applauding. "SET THE CLOCK TO THREE SECONDS!" Owen told him.
"Jesus Christ!" I said.
"IF WE CAN DO IT IN UNDER FOUR SECONDS, WE CAN DO IT IN UNDER THREE," he said. "IT JUST TAKES A LITTLE MORE FAITH."
"It takes more practice," I told him irritably.
"FAITH TAKES PRACTICE," said Owen Meany

Irving uses Owen Meany to analyze faith, not only as in a single religion sense, spirituality as a whole. Despite everything that he endures, Owen Meany never loses his faith, his knowledge that he is an INSTRUMENT OF GOD, as he reminds Johnny on many occasions. It is this faith, through the threat of expulsion, through the lean & hard teen years, and into his enlistment into the army, that keeps Owen going, knowing that he has a mission that he has to fulfill, and not much time to do it. Along the way, he changes Johnny, filling him with confidence and self-reliance and even religion, infusing all of those characteristics that Owen has an abundance of and is loathe to leave behind.

Irving's narrative is uniquely captivating, as is the way that he chooses to depict characters, to breath life into them. Although Owen and Johnny are by far the main characters, they live among a expansive cast, who all have their own place in this tapestry. Owen touches everyone in some small way, leading up to his grand fulfillment.

A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of my favorite books, and many other's that I have lent it to have found a fondness for the story as well. Owen grabs you the way he grabs the other characters in the novel. There is something so strong, so compelling about him that you have to find out what is going to happen.

"NOW I KNOW WHY YOU HAD TO BE HERE," Owen said to me. "DO YOU SEE WHY?" he asked me.
"Yes," I said.
"REMEMBER ALL OF OUR PRACTICING?" he asked me.
"I remember," I said.

And you will remember it, too.

This is quite possibly my favorite book of all time. I think that it is Irving at his best. There are events set out early on in the book that tie back in at the end beautifully. I finished this book on the bus from Mont st. Michelle and cried my eyes out. The characters were just believable enough and yet still stretched the bounds of what you would expect. I hope that someday I find a stuffed armadillo...

Author John Irving is, like me, a non-believer but with this novel he posed himself the question 'What would it take to make me a believer?'

The belief system in question is Christianity; he seems to see belief as a binary equation: Christianity or atheism, but the novel is none the weaker for this, in my opinion. I think to include other faiths and turn it into a multiple choice question would have muddied the overall message. This is a novel, after all, not a theological essay.

Written in the first person from the point of view of unreliable narrator John Wheelwright, a closeted gay man who is painfully in love with his titular best friend (although this is never explicitly stated, it was obvious to me) 'A Prayer for Owen Meany' is exquisitely crafted, deeply moving and highly entertaining.

As well as the question from my opening sentence, this book is also about love in all forms, the politics and reality of war and loss. So much loss. I loved every minute of it.

This was my first John Irving novel but it definitely won't be my last.

P.S. The audiobook, read by Joe Barrett, is astonishingly good. Barrett's performance may well be the single best audiobook reading I've ever listened to.

I've been on a huge John Irving kick recently, and man, am I glad I didn't start with this book because I might have aborted the whole thing before I had a chance to read some of his better works.

This one just didn't do it for me. Whereas I left other Irving novels feeling recharged and alive, I left this one pissed off and ready to drink cheap tequila until I blacked out and woke up in a new world where there are no books or stories or any sort of entertainment derived from the written word.

First of all, I think Irving has a habit of using his novel's narrators as a stand in for himself, which is fine, since he seems like and incredibly interesting dude, but here I felt like he was just going through the motions "Oh, ok, here's my main character, and he's different than me, uh, because we have different names and um...different parents...anyway, yeah, that's how we're different ok story time now!!!" it was a thin disguise at best and didn't work for me at all.

My second problem was the structure. The book takes place over the span of about 30 years, and sometimes events from all thirty were addressed in a single page. Which is fine, if it works, but I felt like he was trying to go for an "omni-present" narrative that ended up being muddled.

I also think the book might work better for people who are a little older than myself. A large part of the story deals with the Vietnam war and it's relation to the Iran Contra scandal. While these passages were in no way "lacking" it did seem like they were aimed for people who were alive during that time, and could share in Irving's (obvious) outrage. Side note - I found myself finding a bazillion (yes, a bazillion) similarities between the national atmosphere in '68, and now.

Oh, and while I love Irving's knack for the unusual, here it seemed like every other page he was trying to force a "classic" situation, wherein unusual characters meet in an unusual situation that illuminates their nature in the most unusual of ways. It got so bad that at times I felt like I was reading a sitcom.

There were a few bright spots. I was genuinely moved by Owen's character, and I thought he served as a wonderful example of how Christ could have been at once holy, and flawed.

Gah - The thing is, Irving is a new love in my life, and like any new love, I wanted it to be perfect. But he isn't and that's fine because who wants perfection anyway but goddamn I wanted to love this one.

Um, yes. Ok, well, I'm giving it two stars - but two stars for Irving is four for most other authors.

Truly one of the most remarkable stories I’ve read recently. I’m kicking myself for not picking it up sooner!

Are you a believer of fate or of coincidence?

Well! That was interesting! I don't know why it took me almost three weeks to read this book. Maybe because I was trying to concentrate and savor all the foreshadowing, the analogies, the humor, and the symbolism in this story, which was about religion, politics, human relationships - life itself. It was during the final 100 pages where everything started falling into place for me. Glad I stuck with it!

This book is definitely character-driven:
*Johnny Wheelwright (narrator) - I would have been more than satisfied if his purpose was to reminisce about the life and times spent with Owen Meany - those were the parts I enjoyed most! BTW, I figured out who his father was within the first chapter! I think telling about his life (after Owen) was filler. Teachers like him often lead students to hate reading! At times, I felt his musings about his female students to be inappropriate.
*Owen Meany (title character) - that VOICE! "He demanded attention; and he got it." He's a self-proclaimed eccentric and peculiar person. What to make of him? Sometimes, I liked Owen, and sometimes he gave me THE SHIVERS.

As an aside: While messaging a GR friend shortly after Biden's Inauguration, he recalled watching Kennedy's Inauguration where Robert Frost struggled reading his poem, so imagine my surprise when I read about this same incident in this particular book several days later! Was this fate, or was it a coincidence?

This book will make you think!

“…belief poses so many unanswerable questions!”

I first read “A Prayer for Owen Meany” about 20 years ago, and loved it. Having just reread it at age 40, I liked it.
The others in my book club who read it in their younger days and were returning to it had the same feelings, so I’m not the odd man out.
The reasons I like this text are numerous.
First off, John Irving writes the hypocrisy and contradictions of human nature very well, and in a manner that does not judge, just acknowledges. Our narrator in this text is Jon Wheelwright, an expat American living in Toronto in the late 1980s. He is telling the reader about his childhood and formative years in his hometown of Gravesend New Hampshire. At least 90% of the novel is Jon’s memory of the past. That is a good thing, because when we get snippets of the present Jon is unlikable and a man who really has not progressed in any true fashion since his mid-twenties. Just as Jon’s self-righteousness and total lack of accurate sense of self gets grating for the reader, Irving writes something that lets you know it is okay to think Jon is a bit of a jerk. I appreciate that human honesty. In fact, Irving said in a 1989 interview this about his character Johnny Wheelwright, “He is puerile. His sense of political outrage is strictly emotional.”
A highlight of the text is the chapter “The Little Lord Jesus”. It is one of the funniest things I have ever read in a novel. It is slap dash mayhem, and yet the deft characterizations are so tantalizingly real that it is blisteringly funny. Humanity, when presented skillfully and truthfully, can be ridiculously funny.
The “voice” of the title character Owen Meany is perhaps the novel’s greatest strength. Owen is vivid, he sticks with you.
The novel also boasts (on page 277 in my edition) one of the best and most concise defenses of religious faith I have come across in fiction.
And despite my saying all that, my reaction this time around was not nearly as strong as 20 years ago. Not even close.
Why?
I am not really sure, but some possible reasons:
The first half of the book is much much stronger than the second half.
The moments in the ‘present’ in Toronto could have been greatly reduced at no loss to the text.
In addition, an editor could have exerted a greater influence on the author before the novel was published. It is a little longer than it needs to be.
Yet, the ending of the text made me nervous and teary. The reader wants to have the power to believe in Owen as God’s instrument, even if he is not. And is he? Moreover, as already mentioned, John Irving writes real people. I love that his books are populated with minor characters who are quite real. This despite the fact that in the novel they are only given a few sentences, but in those sentences Irving creates a humanity.
Therefore, with this text, despite its issues and obvious flaws, I accept it. I embrace its lessons and what it has to say. Maybe that is the point?
As a character says in the text, “Faith itself is the miracle.”

11 year old Owen Meany doesn't believe in mistakes, so when he hits the baseball which causes his best friend Johnny Wheelwright's mother's death , he begins to see himself as an " instrument of God." This coming of age tale of the two boys growing up in a small town in 1950's New Hampshire, is a worthy modern classic about friendship and faith. Owen (though beloved) is described as a small, strange boy with a croaky voice and when he glimpses the exact date and circumstance of his death while performing in a slipshod local production of Scrooge, it becomes impossible not to wonder how the story will turn out. Irving is a writer who knows the implicit importance of a first line and the one here is famous.
"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice--not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even that he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God ; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."
I really loved both the beginning and ending of this 600+ page book, but like others felt that the middle got bogged down with religious ( scriptural) and political ( surrounding the Vietnam War) tirades.
I'm giving the book 3.5 stars , although I have an inkling I will not feel the least bit doomed by remembering it for a good long while.

There are good books and there are those that, when asked what you would recommend to read, you say without thinking Prayer for Owen Mini...