![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() but only a hero as attractive and powerful as Owen Meany, only someone with the strength of “a descending angel-a tiny but fiery god, sent to adjudicate the errors of our ways” could hold together the vastly divergent elements of this story: the armadillo, virgin birth, oversexed cousins, unnamed fathers, granite quarries, missing digits, Marilyn Monroe, angels, Christmas pageants, Canadian literature, armless Indian totems, a dressmaker’s dummy, Liberace, lust, Catholics, television, Episcopalians, baseball, Congregationalists, a Labrador retriever, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. It’s Wheelwright who brings us through a time overshadowed by the moral exhaustion of America and the descending madness of Vietnam. Is it any wonder, then that it is Owen Meany who controls the pace and plot of this astonishing novel? It is John Wheelwright who, from the perspective of his self-imposed exile as an English teacher in present-day Canada, narrates the story of the boys’ adolescence in a small New England prep school town in the ’50s and ’60s. “GOD HAS TAKEN YOUR MOTHER,” he tells his bereaved friend, Johnny Wheelwright. And from the fateful day in his eleventh spring when he hits the foul ball that kills his best friend’s mother, Owen Meany knows. Owen may be small, but his faith is huge. A hero who speaks in a perpetual scream of UNIFORM UPPER-CASE LETTERS. A tiny boy from the massive granite quarries of Gravesend, N.H. John Irving’s seventh novel is dominated by an extraordinary and preposterous hero. ![]()
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