The World According to Garp
A wrestler turned novelist, his famously radical mother, and a life visited by absurd and sudden violence.
T.S. Garp is the son of Jenny Fields, a nurse who wanted a child and not a husband and who becomes, accidentally, a feminist icon. He grows up to wrestle, to write, and to worry about his family with a vigilance that turns out to be entirely justified. Irving’s fourth novel made his name in 1978, and its mixture of broad comedy and sudden, unbearable violence is the template he has worked in ever since.
Recommended by 1 Person
Jason Isaacs
I've not revisited this novel since I was 15, when it reignited a love for reading that skateboarding had sidelined. I didn't look up for three days as I devoured its mix of richly complex characters, gasp-out-loud plotting, and heartbreaking misadventures.
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