The Interim & The Hunger Games

The other day my friend Leanne gently questioned why I didn’t give A Suitable Boy more of a chance. She rightly pointed out that I wasn’t hooked on A Prayer For Owen Meany after 100 pages, either. I suppose I should have provided a better explanation.

I’d heard of John Irving for years though I’d never read one of his books. He came highly recommended and I was fairly certain that if I got to the end of the book (page 543) I’d have found something worth the time it took to read it. A Suitable Boy is 1474 pages. I could have read Owen Meany almost three times in the hours it would have taken to read A Suitable Boy. And A Suitable Boy didn’t grab me. How long would it have taken to get hooked? 200 pages? 800? 1200? I wasn’t willing to spend the time to find out. I don’t want to spend a significant number of hours on a book that I’m not sure I can love. (This would seem to indicate either that I am a discriminating reader or that I have a problem with commitment.)

Before starting the next list book, I read The Hunger Games. Several people (none of my usual sources) said this series is the best they’ve read since Harry Potter. This led me to believe I was in for a real treat. I was skeptical, of course, but willing to give it a go. And while I enjoyed the book, it is certainly not the best thing I’ve read since Harry Potter. Besides, there can be nothing like Harry Potter. Harry was a fine seven-course meal filled with all of the things I love and many things I didn’t even know I could love. The Hunger Games was a satisfying snack. The only thing they have in common is that they are in the same genre, and that is no coincidence. The popularity of Harry Potter caused the young adult fantasy genre to explode. But The Hunger Games was a nice little literary snack, like a handful of sweet grapes and a carton of apricot-mango yogurt. Just enough to satisfy but definitely not enough substance for a meal.

Of course, I eat grapes and apricot-mango yogurt frequently, so I'll definitely finish the series. 

Book One - A Prayer For Owen Meany - Part Three

John Irving

Image from John Irving's Official Author Site

john-irving.com

I finally finished A Prayer For Owen Meany. It took a long time to read. It got really interesting about page 300 and the last fifty pages I had to read non-stop. But before that, I could put it down too easily.

I think I understand why it is some people’s favorite book. When you’re young, the effects of a book like this are profound. When you’re older, not so much. And I don’t think it’s because I’ve grown more cynical with age; I think it’s because I’ve experienced so much more of life. There weren’t many revelations in this book for me, but I can see that the opposite might be true for someone else. I remember reading The Brothers Karamazov when I was about twenty and thinking it was one of the best books I’d ever read. I reread it this year--that existential stuff that is so enlightening in youth simply isn't the same when you're older and wiser. At this point in my life I know that what seems real or right to me may not be real or right to someone else. I also know that examining my feelings is not always an especially effective use of time.

And this is a thread running through A Prayer For Owen Meany. I was wrong about Johnny not feeling much about the events in his life. I won’t say more so as not to spoil it, but one of the lessons of the book is that feelings are not always terribly important. Sometimes we simply need to butch up and do the right thing in spite of our feelings. Some of us accept this better than others. Some of us are lost without our anchors in life. But if we ever get one of those anchors, how lucky, how fortunate are we! Many people never have a touchstone, never find kindred spirits, never find anyone who truly knows how to love. Some only act as a touchstone to another without having one for themselves, yet they somehow find the power to go on. Where they find that power is one of the themes of the book.

While I was reading A Prayer For Owen Meany it sort of felt like an assignment, like I was back in school and needed to be on the lookout for what wasn’t being said, for the importance of the symbolism, the foreshadowing, and the imagery. Yet I can see that Irving’s plot structure is brilliant. I also dreamed about the book, and that’s a measure of how much something affects me. I don’t mean in a weird, dreams are so totally symbolic, dude sort of way, but in a way that indicates I was thinking about it before I went to bed. It’s similar to the way watching an episode of LOST makes me dream about the island. It affects me; it touches me in some way. And I was affected by the book, especially by the revelations at the end of it and how those revelations affected my opinion of the characters. I never really knew them until that moment. If I had, I would have read the book differently. But I suppose that’s the point.

There is something else I noticed. I don’t know whether it will ring true for anyone else, but here’s a quote from page 461 of my Ballentine Books version.
 

How hard it is… to teach wit to teenagers. I despair that another fall is almost upon me and once again I shall strive to make my Grade Ten girls notice something in Wuthering Heights besides every little detail about Catherine and  Heathcliff—the story, the story, it is all they are interested in!

I had teachers like that, even in grad school. Those teachers desperately wanted me to see what they saw in a text. And that is impossible. It is reminiscent of being a teenager and having a favorite poem or a favorite song and trying to share that thing with someone else in the hope that they will also share your feelings about it. They rarely see what you see; they cannot. They are not you. They do not have your life’s experiences. They do not have your feelings. They have not experienced your particular brand of angst. I felt that those teachers were more than a little presumptuous in insisting that I see what they saw, in insisting that I accept the "official" (at least in terms of the academic world) explanation of a work's meaning. I was able to regurgitate their version for tests and essays, but then I went back to what the text meant for me and how the story affected me.

And that is one of the beauties of reading. A book doesn’t have to mean the same thing to everyone! It shouldn’t. And it doesn’t even matter if what it means to me is what the author intended. If it touches me, a story has done its job.

At least in my book.

Book One - A Prayer For Owen Meany - Part Two

Clearly, I underestimated this book. I don't know whether it took a while to get going or I took a while to get into it, but its subtle humor has grabbed me at last. I believe I understand the narrator a bit more, too. His task is not to convince me to love him. His task is to convince me to love Owen Meany.

And he's succeeding.

Book One - A Prayer For Owen Meany - Part One

I wondered at the outset how many of the list books were actually the participants' favorites and how many were books participants thought should be favorites. Sort of like you're supposed to say that you just loved The English Patient when really you couldn’t stand it. I've always felt that way about Wuthering Heights. I heard for years how romantic it is, yet when I read it I did not see Heathcliff as a romantic figure. I saw him as a man in desperate need of medication and a restraining order.

In any case, I am making my way through A Prayer For Owen Meany. I know Irving is supposed to be brilliant but I don't especially love the main character (Johnny) yet. I'm on page 140 and just recently started liking Owen Meany. First person narrators don't usually cause me any problem but the protagonist seems so... aloof, I suppose. When he explains details of traumatic events he seems to want to deny the power of his feelings about those events. I'm not certain what it is about Johnny that prevents me loving him, at least so far. There are things I like about him. He recognizes his flaws and is quite forthcoming about them. I like his view of religion; he believes but also questions and is not threatened by the beliefs of others. He evaluates people by their actions alone. So I like him but do not love him and I don't yet love this book enough to carve out significant chunks of my free time for it.

I do sometimes find that I have this problem with a male protagonist written by a male. I know the statistics say that while men primarily read books only written by men, women read books by men or women. And this has been true in my life. But the older I get the more I find that the books I enjoy the most feature female protagonists written by females. If that trend continues, I suspect I’m in trouble with this list. I hope I find some books I can love, books that are so engrossing that I have to keep reading. I even enjoy the poignant sense of loss at the end of a great book as I miss the characters that came to mean so much.