And once we do, we see contrivances everywhere-in the characters, in the action, in the multitude of pseudo-prophecies that anticipate everything from the lost war in Vietnam to the moral laxity of the Reagan years to the AIDS epidemic, all of which flow only from Irving`s perfect hindsight. Irving plays this game over and over in a vain attempt to gather storytelling momentum. In the first chapter, Irving has John end a section with this: ''How could I have known Owen was a hero?'' Nearly 500 pages later, he teases us with the same withheld information: ''I could never forget how he died. No fewer than two dozen times, he uses one of the hoariest and, at that frequency, one of the most amateurish of plot devices: The narrator teases us with what he knows will happen but we don`t. Irving himself seems to sense that his story keeps faltering. The main actions of ''Owen Meany''-the killing of John`s mother, Owen`s concurrent appearances as the Ghost of Christmas Future and the Baby Jesus in a church pageant, his expulsion from Gravesend Academy, his embrace of Vietnam-era military duty, John`s avoidance of the draft, Owen`s death-are all dragged into a book gone slack. And the Toronto sections are full of undigested rhetoric on American politics and downright dull passages about John`s Anglican parish and the girls` school where he teaches.

Time and time again, he stops to introduce or discuss characters in long set pieces-invoking oddity after oddity in creatures that we never sufficiently see in action.

Irving seems enchanted with all that he knows about New Hampshire history and geography, about the Byzantine structures of life in a private school, about small-town theatrics and any number of other subjects that seem to fill the center of the book. Instead of developing scenes that lead to and build on each other, Irving constantly impedes his tale by focusing on details that fail to contribute to the gathering fullness a reader must feel in the presence of careful storytelling. However, in ''Owen Meany,'' Irving seems to have forgotten how to structure a story. Characters and action existed in a happy symbiosis. The crazy twists of the plot were similarly made convincing by their very momentum and by the naturalness of the characters, strange though they were. The characters were odd, but their oddness seemed self-generated, since they were always in motion, always revealing themselves in dramatized scenes. The book has some of the elements that made ''The World According to Garp'' so attractive to the critics and the bestseller audience alike:įlamboyant, even bizarre, characters unlikely and arresting plot twists a consciousness of contemporary culture and the assertion that a larger mechanism is at work in the universe.īut ''Garp'' was brilliant because it achieved a harmony of its parts.

A prayer for owen meany book review