Further updating books I’ve read previously but never rated...

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I AM DOOMED TO REMEMBER A BOY WITH A WRECKED VOICE...

Some people have many favorite books. I know I do. They are the books that stand out above the rest and deserve their own shelf on the reader's Bookcase O' Life.

On the highest shelf, sits the book that qualifies as the mother of all books for that reader. The one that has touched the reader and imbedded itself in their psyche deeper than any other. So deep that no other book is compared to this One Book because no book can.

A Prayer for Owen Meany sits on the highest shelf of my mythical bookshelf, untouchable. I don't believe any other book will ever come close to unseating it, but I'll keep reading anyway. ;)

This narrator is brilliant! He voiced Owen perfectly.

I didn’t cry as hard this time, but this is my third read of this book and it remains an all time favorite.

A Prayer for Owen Meany was a novel that I had wanted to read for a very long time and was it worth the wait.....................?

For the first 150 pages I was totally engrossed in the story and the characters of John, Owen, John’s Mother Tabitha and Grandmother. But as the story progressed it became bogged down with an over abundance of details, facts and political and religious opinions and at times I found myself totally switching off and longing to get back to the story I started.

I really felt so divided about whether I loved or hated this novel, I loved the humour and the sadness in the novel, I enjoyed the characters, I loved the sense of time and place that John Irving managed to create by his vivid writing. There are some really smart passages from this novel that I totally loved

n  “We have a generation of people who are angry to look forward to,” Owen said. “And maybe two generations of people who don’t give a shit,” he added. n

and regarding the death of Marilyn Monroe
n   “ it has to do with all of us said Owen Meany, when I called him that night, She was just like our country-not quite young anymore, but not quire old either, a little breathless, very beautiful, maybe a little stupid, maybe a lot smarter than she seemed” n

I loved the characters and felt I know each and every one of them I especially loved Tabitha and Grandmother but did not enjoy the character of Owen or John although I did appreciate how well they were written. I love how the author brings to life all of his characters and I enjoyed the fact that they all had a voice in this novel while some were entertaining some were downright boring as in the case of John but they all have a place in this story.

There were times in this novel I hated this book and was tempted so many times to throw in the towel as I found parts of the story so boring. I especially disliked the Christmas Nativity Section and while I read the long winding and boring description of this play and its characters and happenings I think my mind was a million miles away. I also felt that the author was preaching to me throughout the novel and I really disliked his political and religious ramblings.

I think if I could draw a bar chart for each chapter I could better represent my highs and lows on this novel than writing a review. Its not a book I would recommend to my friends but having said that I am glad I finally got around to reading this Novel. A difficult book for me to rate but I think I have settled on a 3 star rating as I liked it but did not love it and found it way too long.

Excellent story, fantastic writing and a character you will never forget!

Highly recommend!

Oh my! Where to start! How has John Irving never come to my attention before now?!!! I can't even remember how I stumbled upon this book but boy am I glad I did?!! The essence of the story has such a simple premise but Irving is so much of a genius, he manages to create a masterpiece out of that premise. His knack for description and narrative is uncanny. Owen Meany is such a complex, loveable, arrogant, petulant, honest, real, raw character whose life and reason for being is fascinating to unravel. The "story" of him and John is so expertly crafted and woven, I found myself drifting through hundreds of pages with ease and certainty. Sometimes books with a pseudo religious theme can be a bit off putting for me but the religious undertones to this story totally make it what it is. It's just pure literary genius. I applaud John Irving for one of the greatest tales ever written.

John Irving is a master of the messed-up. A Prayer for Owen Meany is a careful, tightly-managed piece of stage magic wrapped up into a book. The eponymous character in this book has a distinctive, almost shrill pre-pubescent voice, even into adulthood. It’s impossible to convey that on the page, but Irving tries by rendering Owen’s dialogue in ALL CAPS—during Owen’s few speeches, these can run to paragraphs or a page. I don’t visualize things when I read (I can’t picture Owen’s creepy child proportions, no matter how hard I try), but I can imagine his voice. I imagine the voice of Linus from A Charlie Brown Christmas, slightly higher-pitched and perhaps louder.

Why is Owen’s voice different? There is a reason according to the plot. Thematically, however, Owen’s voice is the most striking signal of his otherness. Owen’s appearance can be described, but such descriptions are transitory—they come and go throughout the text, and it is easy to forget them (or, as in my case, fail to reify them properly). Voice, though … voice sticks. Even if one is not reading aloud, or being read to, one can imagine a voice as one reads silently. And those blatant capital letters scattered across the pages do a brilliant job reminding one that Owen Meany is Different. We don’t find out how different until the very last pages, when everything Irving has left simmering for six hundred pages finally comes to a sharp boil.

There’s a payoff to reading this book. From the beginning, the narrator—John Wheelwright—hints that there is an element of fate to the story. We know that Owen isn’t going to make it out of this alive, and gradually we learn that in the process he will also make himself a hero. What’s creepy is that Owen is aware of this, and as the story progresses, it becomes clearer that Owen is manipulating events to bring his vision of the future to come to pass. From his admission into the army to his practising of “the shot”, Owen devotes his entire life to preparing for his single, shining moment of sacrifice.

It takes a long time to get there. Irving doesn’t let us take any shortcuts. Instead, he provides a slow biography of Owen and John, with an emphasis on their eternal friendship despite Owen’s involvement in the death of John’s mother. Along the way, Irving lays the foundation for what comes at the end of the book. More than that, however, Irving is building a case for Owen’s type of faith. Owen belives—in God, in himself, in the future—and works tirelessly, shrewdly, uncompromisingly in support of that faith. He first scoffs at doubt, then confronts it, then embraces it and emerges from it with a stronger conviction.

I think, at its core, A Prayer for Owen Meany might be a ghost story. Ghosts make appearances in various, symbolic forms—the ghosts in Dan’s annual performance of A Christmas Carol, the voice of Owen Meany that haunts the secret corridor at 80 Front Street, just to name a few. Owen’s glimpse of the future it itself a kind of ghost, echoing into the past. When John finally meets his father, it’s like a ghost coming back from the dead—and to punish his father for revealing himself, John scares him with a fake ghost of his mother.

I’m tempted to single out John as the weak link in this book. As far as a character goes, he’s rather lacklustre. The older John of the Toronto, 1987 scenes is about as interesting as dishwater, and the younger John isn’t much better. I’m not sure this criticism is particularly apt, however; Irving does go out of his way to provide John with plenty of backstory and plot of his own, including the matter of his parentage, the death of his mother, and his own ambivalent feelings towards Vietnam and America. My dissatisfaction with John is more likely because Owen just overshadows him at every turn. But I suppose this book demands a first-person narrator; it needs that closeness and element of fallible human speculation that a limited omniscient narrator just can’t provide.

Another difficult aspect of the book would be its tendency to switch frequently—and without warning—among different times. It jumps from the main narrative to John in 1987 to moments in between with fearsome alacrity. One paragraph it’s 1964, then it’s 1967, and then we are back to 1964. This can be frustrating and bewildering at times, but it indicates the amount of planning and preparation Irving must have done to have everything coalesce in the proper manner. Instead of telling a completely linear tale, Irving somehow knows which moments need to be adjacent to strike the right mood and sense of character.

For all of those reasons above, I’m just gobsmacked by the literary quality of A Prayer for Owen Meany. As a reader and a writer, I just find the execution of this book impressive. Even if I hadn’t enjoyed the story (which I did), I would still have to rate this highly for the inordinate skill it displays. And, of course, my enjoyment is partly a result of that same skill’s ability to manipulate my emotions. There are parts of this book that made me gasp, made me groan, or made me cry.

Owen’s “gift” to Johnny late in the book was perhaps the most emotionally-heavy moment, for me, of the entire story. Irving foreshadows the hell out of the ending, so while it is tragic it wasn’t necessarily shocking. Owen’s “gift” shocked me (and while I have read this before, I had no recollection of that moment). It was a twist that Irving kept carefully concealed, but it made a lot of sense—and it’s so an idea that Owen Meany would conceive. But that’s not even why I’m so moved. It’s those last few paragraphs, when Owen tries to comfort John, to tell John he loves him and that everything will be OK … that, juxtaposed with what he does, is the epitome of pathos and tragedy. I had to stop reading, briefly, not because I was crying or upset but because I was just … floored … by the act and the emotions behind it.

A Prayer for Owen Meany is a complex but well-crafted novel. It has a slow-paced, meditative story that reflects the tension and conflicting emotions in the American zeitgeist during the Vietnam War. Irving touches on life and loss, fear and faith—all the good stuff you need for a truly deep, memorable experience. This is one of my favourite Irving novels and an amazing book in general. It is an impressive and intense performance disguised as a novel.

It's taken me several years to get into this one: now I'm not sure why. It's long and the book starts slowly, although it's always very well-written. But the story (and the writing) pick up momentum as it goes along and by the last third I could hardly put it down. And the ending, although the reader is prepared for it, is riveting.

Owen Meany and Johnny Wheelright are childhood friends. This friendship not only survives but becomes even closer following a tragedy, which happens right at the beginning of the novel: Owen hits a baseball that strikes Johnny's mother and kills her. Owen is notable both for his small stature and his high-pitched voice (which is represented in all-caps typeface which took me some time to adjust to). He comes from a poor family, John comes from one of the town;s most prominent ones (the town is a New Hampshire town like many of Irving's settings). The story begins in the early 1950s, follows the two through the 1960s, and is interspersed with remarks from John written in 1987.

Although small and odd, Owen is a remarkable person who is deeply respected by the town. Much of the story meditates on faith, doubt, and religion. The book is almost a meditation on what faith is (and what it's not). It also looks at what miracles are-do they exist? what do they mean if they do?
who decides if they are real or not?

The book is sad, even tragic, but there is also humor throughout. Certainly a lot of it is dry wit (especially when examining John's social relations, his difficulties with girls, and his life as a teacher). Owen himself can be very funny.

At one point, Irving quotes Hardy as saying that a storyteller is like the Ancient Mariner and must have a story worth stopping people to listen to.

This is that story.

A Prayer for Owen Meany was one of John Irving's earlier works that I have waited too long to read, what a beautiful and engaging book. This is the tale of two young boys growing up in a small community in New Hampshire, Gravesend, and their friendship throughout the late twentieth century, the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. They remained close friends throughout their childhood, their college years and beyond. This is the story of Owen Meany, an extremely small child, his father working in the granite business, often rumored to give Owen's pale skin its translucency and his voice its loud timbre. Owen's best friend is Johnny Wheelwright living with his single mother and grandmother in the family home that was established in the mid-1600s. The Wheelwright family was a matriarchal family with a large and raucous extended family. As the book opens we learn much about the enduring friendship between Owen Meany and John Wheelwright:

n  

"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 because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason that I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."

n

There is also a vibrant history of America during that time from the Camelot days of the Kennedy's, through the turbulent 1960s with its assassinations and into the Vietnam war and the anti-war demonstrations as more Americans were being killed during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. This is also the time of Reagan's presidency and the Iran-contra scandal. It was a time awash in a lot of political upheaval. In the words of John Wheelwright:

n  

"If someone ever presumed to teach Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy or Robertson Davies to my Bishop Strachan students with the same, shallow, superficial understanding that I'm sure I possess of world affairs--or, even, American wrongdoing--I would be outraged. I am a good enough English teacher to know that my grasp of American misadventures--even in Vietnam, not to mention Nicaragua--is shallow and superficial. Whoever acquired any real or substantive intelligence from reading newspapers? I'm sure I have no in-depth comprehension of American villainy; yet I can't leave the news alone!"

Four strong winds that blow lonely,
Seven seas that run high,
All those things that don't change come what may,
But our good times are all gone.
And I'm movin' on,
I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way."

n

It's been almost 25 years since I first read A Prayer for Owen Meany. I remembered I loved it. I remembered Irving's wisdom and wit. I remembered laughing out loud about Owen Meany's all-caps rants and hilarious observations. I remembered his high-pitched voice, small stature, and his unshakeable faith, of course.

But I'd forgotten so much more than I'd remembered. How could I have forgotten the dressmaker's dummy or the nativity of 1954? How did I possibly forget Hester, for goodness sake, or the Holy Goalie and her missing arms? I even forgot about the armadillo! If you've read Owen Meany, you know how John Irving expertly crafts this quirky story out of little details that often seem bizarre, mostly because Owen Meany was involved in them, but he somehow manages to make it feel light-hearted and familiar, too. The amazing thing to me is that every single one of these strange, funny, sweet details plays a role in Owen's destiny. His finale of all finales. I'm astounded at the scope of it all.

There's also an element of nostalgia to this story that throws the reader off guard. You don't realize for quite some time that you're actually reading a book full of very insightful views on politics, religion, and morality. You're not aware of this because John Irving is a genius and a master storyteller. I'm looking forward to spending more time reading his writing. I think I'll start with The Cider House Rules next.

Thank you, thank you, John Irving, for this wonderful book. I can't wait for my kids to grow up a little and read it for themselves.

I started this book with high expectations: a few of my friends had said that “A Prayer” is the best Irving-book, even better than The Cider House Rules, which I loved. I must concede I was a bit disappointed. “A Prayer” has some nice, even hilarious, passages. And the character Owen Meany, with his small stature, his odd voice and unconventional opinions and behavior, certainly arouses sympathy. But I have an issue with the message of this book: it has no clear focus. There’s a lot of attention to religion, but it’s not clear what Irving exactly tries to say about that: did he want to ridicule religion or on the contrary illustrate the value of it? Especially the predestination-theme, related to the Owen Meany-character, was troublesome to me.

The book devotes at least as much attention to the moral bankruptcy of the United States since the sixties, and this is illustrated by the fiasco of the Vietnam war. In his political message Irving is very sharp and critical for his fellow Americans and especially their political leaders (Reagan included, of course). This double message – political and religious – hampers the storyline and makes some chapters rather long-winded. In short: this is certainly a worthy and entertaining read, but it is not the masterpiece I had expected.

Much like Garcia Marquez's Vivir Para Contarlo, this book took FOREVER, and I sometimes felt embarrassed to have been carrying it around for weeks. I felt obligated to apologize to people: "I swear I'm a fast reader! I've just had a lot of work to do, and... this fucking thing is 550 pages!"

Somehow, though, it never felt that long. It never felt tedious, I mean; it felt long in the sense that it seemed I had known Owen and Johnny forever. It felt long in that the passage of time was steady and purposeful, never choppy, but never sluggish. In these 550 pages, I became introduced to a world so rich and so comic that I felt entirely a part of it, familiar with every character and every nuance.

I had seen Simon Birch when I was 8 or so; I remember being horrified because one of the boys says, "You look like shit," and I had never heard the s-word in a movie before. I found out the movie was based on this book before I started reading it, and throughout the first half, scenes from the movie kept flashing into my head. As the book progressed, though, the story changed entirely and lost a lot of what made it so powerful.

The religious part of this book, I'll admit, was nearly lost on me - that is to say, I understood and appreciated the language, but I am so entirely unfaithful, so entirely non-believing, that a good chunk of the book's theme was just unrelatable for me. Still, Irving presented Owen's (and later, Johnny's) beliefs in such a compelling, sincere, and apolitical way that I couldn't help but be admiring of their faith rather than cynical.

Further, the political themes in this novel were SO compelling that everything else had been awful, it still would have been a masterpiece. Reading Owen Meany's assessment of Kennedy: "I THINK HE'S A KIND OF SAVIOR... HE'S GOT SOMETHING WE NEED", his hope and optimism and belief in a better government, was incredibly resounding after Obama's election. It's a bit sad, too; the optimism for Kennedy obviously didn't pan out, and one can only hope that the cyclical nature of poor government doesn't continue. This cyclical nature is painfully evident in the narrator's complaints about the Vietnam war and later, the Iran-Contra scandal - he laments a government so willing to put boys in an unjust war, so willing to lie to its people. Obviously, things have not changed at all. But like Owen Meany, I will have faith in something - in this case, faith that things will get better - even if there is no evidence to support it.

5 stars

I must start by saying this is by far the most unique book I have ever read! All I knew going in was that this is billed as a phenomenal character study, and the protagonist hits that baseball where it shouldn’t have gone. But Lordy, this tale is far more than that.

The story is narrated by Owen’s best friend, Johnny Wheelwright, who has his own story to tell as well. Owen is an irritating little fella who stands just under 5 feet, is light as a feather, and has a whiny, screamy, baby voice. And what a spitfire he is! For a great portion of this tome I wondered how he was going to come out of this looking good. But gradually I warmed up to him and ultimately fell in love.

Sometimes (OK, a lot of times) I was uncertain where the book was going, and the timeline jumps about. The story, set for the most part in New Hampshire, begins in the early 1950s and moves forward through the years until the mid 1960s. It then hops to the late 80s, catching us up on Johnny’s life. From that point it moves back and forth between the past and the 80s. Throughout all this we wade through quite a few philosophical soliloquys, mainly about the Vietnam war and about religion. But be patient. As the end approaches all the little vignettes, the musings, the “seemingly nonsense” are all weaved together into a powerful, monumental, and emotional ending, leaving the reader totally wrecked and with enough to think about for years to come. I had never read John Irving before, but his works are now square in the middle of my radar. This man is stunningly brilliant!

Not only did this book give me so much to think about, but it also made me laugh louder and longer than any other book I can recall. I always read while eating breakfast and lunch and nearly choked several times while reading the chapters entitled “The Angel”, “The Little Lord Jesus”, and “The Ghost of the Future.” Priceless!

I dreamed about this book. That has never happened before. And how ironic that it was THIS book that was the first I ever dreamt about. You will understand if you read the book.

Do I recommend A Prayer for Owen Meany? Does the sun rise every morning? But you must commit to it. It is nearly 700 pages, it can meander, and it is not action packed. But boy, is it profound and oh, so rewarding. It will without a doubt be on my top ten (or five or three or better) list of all time when I ultimately make my way to the big kindle in the sky.