420 - A Prayer for Owen Meany

A Prayer for Owen Meany
By John Irving
New York, William Morrow, 1989. 543 pp. $19.95.

Apart from the ostensible religiosity of the title, the first thing one notices about John Irving's seventh novel, A Prayerfor Owen Meany, is the banal tone of the narrator. Repetitive and chatty, at times almost cloying, John Wheelwright reconstructs the "miraculous" story of his best friend, Owen Meany, from childhood to avoidable death. While every episode about Owen Meany is quintessentially dramatic, Wheelwright himself remains stodgily eccentric, a middle-aged bachelor whose faith in God hovers respectably on the brink of established religion and whose sexual life is as virginal as the Joseph of an elementary school Christmas pageant. "I'm still just a Joseph," he matter-of-factly states, and everything of interest that has happened in his life, including "being a Christian" and "believing in God," was the work of Owen Meany.

Irving has Wheelwright conduct his long conversational narrative in a style so pedestrian that it includes the texts of favorite hymns and is interspersed with quotations from the Bible. Gradually, we learn that John Wheelwright was able to avoid the draft by submitting to symbolic "castration" at the hands of Owen Meany, who as a final "gift" of love to his friend amputates the latter's index finger; thus in spite of the fact that Wheelwright is not a genuine "American misfit"-he never had to flee the United States during the time of the Vietnam war-he eventually crosses the border (on Owen's advice) and becomes an ersatz Canadian. The tale is so replete with anti-American rhetoric that any long-time Toronto resident (which Irving actually is) would immediately recognize the views of the ex-American storyteller as more "Canadian" than those of most Canadians-i.e., preoccupied with pointing out the relentless stupidity of American culture and politics.

An Anglican "convert," Wheelwright ends up being a nondescript parishoner of "Grace Church-on-the Hill." His Owen Meany-inspired struggle to believe in God is bounded by the comfortable neighborhood between Upper Canada College and the St. Clair Reservoir, where he likes to walk his dog. His sexual neutrality makes him a perfectly "safe" grade-ten literature teacher at Bishop Strachan High School for girls (even the one or two "hard-ons" Wheelwright manages to have in his life are described as "not much"), and his anti-American moralizing, while accurate and true and therefore capable of eliciting sympathy from the reader-in whom he confides at length-is as dull and monotonous as

421 - A Prayer for Owen Meany

the Toronto Globe and Mail. But Johnny, as he is affectionately called by those who know him, is not therefore less endearing.

That Irving pulls off Wheelwright's 543-page "prayer"-a homage to Owen's FAITH-in so overstated a narrative style is a literary tour de force. It prevents one from believing that Irving wants us to take any of this story literally. In fact the novel is hilariously comic, a religiocultural cartoon, and one finds oneself enjoying it and laughing right out loud. Yet for readers who want to maintain a degree of intellectual or moral integrity, there is no choice but to take the story of Owen Meany-and the theology John Irving succeeds in inscribing in Wheelwright's text as a memorial of Owen's flesh-absolutely seriously.

In itself, the story of Owen's life and death is as bizarre and incredible as THE VOICE Owen Meany was in his life and became shortly after his death: with perfect clarity it is able to speak from before or beyond the grave. And since Owen's voice always speaks in CAPITAL LETTERS, one cannot easily dismiss its authority. It would be inappropriate, of course, to confuse John Wheelwright with John Irving, but the two seem to be enough alike to prevent one from writing off either of them as a religious kook. Ultimately, John Wheelwright emerges from the experience of Owen's life and death ready to utter a prayer. Finally able to speak for himself, he takes a stand as a timid but articulate latter-day prophet of the doom that Owen Meany, as a child playing the Ghost of the Future in Dickens' Christmas Carol, saw printed on Scrooge's gravestone and spent the rest of his life living out. What Owen saw but did not understand, what he recoiled from in terror but pursued with single-minded zeal, was the sacrifice of his life at the hands of the MORAL EXHAUSTION (and OVERSIMPLIFIED LARGENESS) of the post-Vietnam American ethos. Owen had unmasked these sins and denounced them from his youth, and now John Wheelwright must spend the rest of his life muddling around in a seemingly ineffective yet convincing discipleship of what Owen had labeled FAITH.

The story oscillates-too dynamic a word for Wheelwright-between up-to-date journal entries and intricately detailed flashbacks of the novel's main events. Flat and definitive as Proper Nouns, these appear one by one like icons. They entitle Wheelwright to spend each chapter embellishing a detail of Owen's life: The Foul Ball, The Armadillo, The Angel, The Little Lord Jesus, The Ghost of the Future, The Voice, The Dream, The Finger, The Shot. Under each of these headings, Wheelwright constructs an elaborate foundation for Owen's believability. In huge, unnuanced blocks of print that loom larger than the CAPITAL LETTERS in which is enshrined EVERY WORD THAT OWEN MEANY EVER SAID, Wheelwright engraves Owen's story, like the date of his death, unquestionably in stone. Despite Owen Meany's unbelievably miniature size and never-changing voice (and in spite of the obstacle of the opening chapter in which Owen hits a foul ball that kills John Wheelwright's mother), the character of Owen Meany has a remarkable cumulative effect. He is able to move us deeply. And to our

422 - A Prayer for Owen Meany

increasing amazement, the further we go in allowing ourselves to keep listening to Wheelwright's report, the more we are taken in against our will and the more we find ourselves entranced by the artful "evangelizing" of this irresistibly convincing "gospel." In spite of our best critical defenses, Owen Meany emerges as powerful and exaggerated as Michaelangelo's Moses.

Clearly this is a novel about the single-mindedness of faith. It is best read comically as a theological pun. It proclaims a prophetically ludic denunciatory gospel to a bankrupt American culture. The "little Lord Jesus," when he comes, incarnates a disarming pronouncement of how hard it is to find real faith on earth. "NEVER CONFUSE FAITHOF ANY KIND-WITH SOMETHING EVEN REMOTELY INTELLECTUAL," declares Owen Meany, whose death, like his allegedly miraculous birth and the distressing fatalism of his life, defies rational explanation. Owen Meany is so terrifyingly single-minded, so utterly set on the predetermined course that leads him to his death-so lacking, in short, in what science would call the historical causality of plot-that he has no rhyme or reason. He is completely gratuitous. As a result, he is utterly believable.

A Prayer for Owen Meany is thus a theologically powerful comic gospel that strikes one as deadly serious. It is less in the tradition of Charles Dickens, with whom Irving has been compared, than in the spirit of Tristram Shandy-profoundly moving, uproariously funny, filled with mockery of the phony sublime and tinged with human sadness. One cannot help thinking that Irving has created a novel of the grotesque that is worthy of Flannery O'Connor. With typical candor, that master of exaggeration once pointed out that in an age of almost nonexistent religious and ethical sensibilities-the moral equivalent of blindness and deafness--one must draw pictures that are extremely large and SHOUT IN A VERY LOUD VOICE.

Frances Stefano
Seton Hill College
Greensburg, Pennsylvania