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| The Armadillo |
The book... A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.
The meeting date... October 26, 2012.
To Refresh your memory... here is a summary from www.Shelfari.com:
This is John Irving's most comic novel, yet Owen Meany is Mr. Irving's most heartbreaking character. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery 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, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of 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, as Highlights magazine 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 enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born 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.What we said... The book was engaging but very long. A lot of us couldn't finish it in time for the meeting. It seemed to go on and on and on. Those of us that listened to the tapes had a treat listening to the strange voice of Owen.
The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford 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's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God.
"Roomy, intelligent, exhilarating and darkly comic...Dickensian in scope....Quite stunning and very ambitious." LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"John Irving is an abundantly and even joyfully talented storyteller." THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
We had a lively discussion about the complicated plot, the symbolism, allegory, the characters and the narrator John, how he remained somewhat troubled throughout the book and seemed to have more faith in Owen than he had in God. John Irving did a great job with character development.
