The Real Thing

...he said...

...No, it isn't,' Garp agrees...

...Ralph tells him...

...Feminist zeal or lunacy, as represented by the Ellen Ja-mesians, women who cut out their tongues in solidarity with a young girl who was raped and mutilated, plays a very large part in the plot...

...As a son, husband, lover, father, however, he is as much in its grip as the characters in his novels and short stories...

...the real thing...

...after a while the mayhem, caused mostly by bad luck and the lunacy of others, makes Garp's unrelenting hysteria over the safety of his family almost reasonable...

...But I'm so bad at it!' Mrs...

...You could at least stay and talk to me!' Mrs...

...And this is his fourth novel...

...Jesus, is everyone bananas?' "Garp slumps back on the water-bed, eyes shut tight...

...What can I do?' Garp calls up the stairs...

...He seems capable of acknowledging threats most of us prefer not to dwell upon...

...I was just trying to help you,' Garp says...

...Ralph's lap...

...How can you leave me like this?' Her wailing grows louder...

...Reviewed by Walter Goodman T. S. Garp is a writer, and so The World According to Garp is, naturally, an exploration of the way the novelist turns life into fiction...

...Please believe me, I never messed around with anyone until he left me,' Mrs...

...But it is considerably more than that...

...Garp is an obsessive, about his wife and children as well as about his work...

...The incident is a bit too heavily signalled perhaps-too much attention drawn to the gear shift without a knob, to Garp's technique for entering his driveway-yet it is so brilliantly wrought that one chuckles even amid the gore, until the full horror of the event, withheld for almost a chapter, takes the grin from the lips...

...Ralph shouts...

...I hope you never walk out on your wife,' Mrs...

...And then he said that almost any other woman, young or old, looked better to him than I did...

...You don't help me by hurting Bill,' Mrs...

...Ralph is crying...

...She sits with her legs crossed, her kimono tight around her, Bill's large head in her lap...

...It doubles back upon itself, and affects life as well as art...

...He is, as a critic says of Garp, "original...

...Ralph, in utter rumplement upon the water bed...

...Ralph tells Garp...

...soon, Garp thinks, the dog will start to bay...

...Ralph shouts...

...Here is a part of it, for the pleasure of the conversation...

...I don't get my rocks off by humiliating myself, you know,' Mrs...

...It is an absorbing, funny and painful trip...

...As a writer, Garp is able to control his imagination, more or less, and make it work for him...

...Examples of these, by the way, are printed here, and show T. S. Garp to have a considerable offbeat talent, just like John Irving...

...His wife and especially his children, objects of his love, become the victims of his obsessions...

...For most of the book the reader attends upon Garp, as he learns what he is and attempts to be good at it...

...Garp's imagination is no one-way street...

...Garp, sturdy as a wrestler despite his shakiness over what fate has in store for those he loves best, is indignant at people who are eager to torment themselves and others in the name of some higher cause...

...Perhaps Garp's fourth would have brought him the attention that this one should bring Irving...

...You goody-goody chickenshit wingding!' " 'Whats's a wingding?' Garp wonders, navigating the stairs...

...But when the technique works, as it does most of the time, Irving draws remarkable power from the way he can put together a carefully realistic account of his hero's life-his jogging, wrestling, screwing, cooking-with complications that become surreal...

...You probably think this happens to me all the time,' says Mrs...

...Oh, Bill,' she sobs...

...Ralph...

...He has already outlived Garp by several years...

...The book is catching...

...Ralph explains...

...Garp only managed three...

...In some heightened ways Garp's world borrows from the public world we all inhabit...

...the dog licks his fingers...

...Don't you hurt Bill!' Mrs...

...It's very hard on a woman's confidence,' Mrs...

...Ralph says...

...Ralph...

...The wonder of the novel is John Irving's ability, in straightfaced prose, and often in a single paragraph, to embed superlative jokes in bloody events...

...This scene involves a hippy, a waterbed, an affectionate Labrador, a couple of cops and a considerable amount of misunderstanding...

...Her means of conception, though not absolutely miraculous, leaves her, in a manner of speaking, virginal...

...That's not very nice, is it?' Mrs...

...Why shouldn't I try to have some fun?' " 'You should.' Garp says...

...Garp wonders: Is it Bill or Mrs...

...Garp whacks the dog's nose-too hard-and the poor beast whines and slinks away...

...Ralph...

...I believe you,' Garp says...

...Ralph asked Garp...

...Garp hears her talking to the dog...

...Ralph says...

...But maybe he's past the danger point...

...indeed, several of the passages seem programmed...

...He writes best when he can break out of his private world, but that is not easy for him,and what is difficult in his writing is impossible in his ordinary or extraordinary life...

...His mother, Jenny, an instinctually thoroughgoing feminist, prefers to have no truck with men-She takes a knife to one persistent admirer-but she does want a child...

...There is nothing wanting in John Irving's imagination...

...He just told me he'd been faking his interest in me, "for years...

...You're so nice.' " 'Goodbye!' Garp calls up the stairs...

...Ralph confesses, holding her hands to her eyes, rocking on the bed...

...Bill is breathing in Garp's hair...

...For God's sake, sit down.' She pulls Garp to the rocking bed...

...Back inside, Mrs...

...It's the shiftiest thing a man can do,' says Mrs...

...the bed rolls like a small sea, and Garp groans...

...I'm sorry I abuse you, Bill...

...There may be something to that, but the deeper interest of this admirable quirky novel lies in how an abundance of imagination opens one to cruelties that duller spirits scarcely notice-and invites catastrophe...

...The marriage counsel man...

...The product, Garp, is destined to die at 33, like Jesus, an affectation that need not detain us...

...The dog tries to lick her face but Garp pushes him away...

...There is a tentative lick at his ear...

...My husband used to fill it all the time because it leaks.' " 'I'm sorry,' Garp says...

...Since Irving bears so many resemblances to his hero-the wrestling and jogging, the stay in Vienna, the life in New England, the close family-he had better take care of himself...

...Ralph says...

...The book is full of hilariously horrible scenes...

...Your friend's gone, and I'm going too.' " 'Chickenshit!' yells Mrs...

...Garp, in fact, does think so, but he shakes his head...

...The novel, and so Garp's life, begins in violence and wilfulness...

...Garp has just ejected a lover who has overstayed his welcome from the lady's bedroom...

...the dog thinks Garp is playing with him and lunges across Mrs...

...In a misconceived epilogue, Irving makes his preferred form of feminism explicit, and a bit preachy as well...

...The central one, likely to become part of many a reader's nightmares, involves a terrible automobile accident-In which a young fellow (whom we have grown to detest) loses three-quarters of his penis...

...She takes his hand and holds it in her lap...

...There is too much mayhem in the book...

...As his mother's single ill-written book makes her a heroine of the feminist cause, his work makes him an enemy...

...A chapter about Garp's nighttime journey, in shorts, without jock, to bring home his older son from a sleep-over with a friend whose mother Garp believes is depraved, is a masterful example of his craft...

...There's not enough water in the damn thing,' Mrs...