Key themes
- Accident as the governing force of life — and the people who survive it
- The feminist mother and the son who loves her without fully understanding her
- Writing as a way of managing the chaos you cannot control
About this book
T.S. Garp, the illegitimate son of a feminist icon who never wanted a husband, grows up in New England schools, becomes a novelist, and navigates a life of extraordinary personal loss. Irving's breakthrough novel is about accidents, violence, family and the bizarre randomness of fate — and it established the large, comic, tragic American novel as Irving's form.
Published in 1978, The World According to Garp was Irving's fourth novel and his breakthrough. He had been influenced by Dickens and Kurt Vonnegut, both of whom Irving had studied. The novel spent months on the bestseller list.
Discussion questions
- Garp's mother Jenny Fields is one of the most unusual mothers in American fiction — a feminist icon who never wanted a partner. How does Irving develop her — and what does Garp's complicated relationship with her feminism add?
- The novel is full of sudden, arbitrary violence and loss. How does Irving develop this — as dark comedy, as tragedy, or as something that keeps disrupting the categories?
- Garp is a novelist, and excerpts from his fiction appear within the novel. What does this meta-fictional layer add — and what does Garp's fiction reveal about the novel's concerns?
- The World According to Garp came out in 1978 and made Irving famous. What was new about it — and what does it share with Dickens and Hardy, whom Irving explicitly admired?
- The novel has a feminist text and a complicated relationship to feminism. How does Irving develop this — respectfully, problematically, or with genuine ambivalence?
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