A Prayer for Owen Meany
by John Irving
Summary
John Wheelwright narrates from Toronto in the late 1980s, working backward into his childhood in Gravesend, New Hampshire, where his best friend was Owen Meany, a boy so small other children could lift him overhead with one hand and whose voice never broke, so Irving prints every one of Owen's lines in capital letters for the length of the book. During a Little League game Owen hits the foul ball that kills John's mother, an accident neither boy recovers from and one Owen comes to read as the first proof of a destiny he believes God has assigned him. Playing the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in a town production of A Christmas Carol, Owen sees his own name and death date on the prop gravestone and takes the vision as literal, spending the rest of the novel preparing for it. He and John spend years perfecting a basketball drill they call the shot, in which John lifts Owen for a two second dunk, without either boy fully admitting why Owen insists on it. When John faces the draft, Owen cuts off part of his friend's finger with a diamond saw to keep him out of Vietnam, a war Owen serves stateside as a casualty assistance officer; on the date his vision showed him, in an airport restroom in Phoenix, a disturbed young man throws a grenade into a room full of Vietnamese children, and Owen and John run the shot one final time, Owen catching and smothering the grenade, saving the children and dying exactly as he foresaw.
Irving cuts between the New Hampshire boyhood and John's furious present tense commentary on American foreign policy under Reagan, and the middle third can feel baggy even as the central friendship holds the long book together. Owen's capitalized voice is disorienting for a few pages and then becomes the novel's most reliable pleasure, funny in most scenes and quietly devastating in a few; readers tend either to surrender to its mix of comedy, religious conviction and grief or to find the coincidences piling up past what they can accept, and both reactions are common enough to have followed the book for decades.
Historical Context & Significance
William Morrow published the novel in March 1989, six hundred seventeen pages that became, by Irving's own publisher's account, his bestselling book in any language. It reached no major prize shortlist that year. Irving's three National Book Award recognitions all belong to earlier novels, The World According to Garp as a 1979 finalist and a 1980 paperback award winner and The Hotel New Hampshire as a 1982 finalist, and the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction jury elevated only two books for that year's prize, E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate and the eventual winner, Oscar Hijuelos's The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love; Owen Meany was not among them.
Reviews split over the same things readers still argue about. The critic Alfred Kazin dismissed narrator John Wheelwright as an unapologetic wimp, while other readers found Owen's death the most affecting scene Irving had written. A 1998 film, Simon Birch, adapted the story loosely and, at Irving's own insistence, dropped the title and every character's name; a more faithful stage version reached London's Royal National Theatre in 2002, and BBC Radio 4 produced a five part dramatization in 2009, each a later recognition a book that had won no prize at all managed to earn on its own.