Prayer for Owen Meany
Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movieSimon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel sinceFlannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, theGarp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, asHighlightsmagazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose."  When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enactingA Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that hewasborn to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies'sDeptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel,Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass'sThe Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment,Owen Meanyis also a meditation on literature, history, and God.--Tim Appelo--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.