A Prayer for Owen Meany

I went to a very, very good school. I don't mean my college, though that was certainly great as well; the public school system in the town where I was raised (and regrettably, still live, boo) is quite good. All the same, I was not in the habit of reading any of the assigned literature, even though I took all the AP English courses. So my self-satisfied little bubble was quite burst when I actually went down the checklist of books on the two 100 Best Novels lists. For my 101 in 1001 list, I set myself the task of reading 50 of the books on the list(s), with ones read before not to count. Because, in my vast reading experience, I had surely read at least a quarter of them already.

Now, I was a big reader as a little one, but I often chose to relive old favorites rather than pick up new stuff. So I know the whole Little House series, My Side of the Mountain and The Giver by heart. When I got to high school and SSR (sustained silent reading) was done away with, I forgot about books. If I wasn't forced to remember what I was reading during the day, I forgot about it and never finished it. I cannot tell you why, as an avid and I dare say good reader, Going After Cacciato sits on my little girls' blue bookshelf, its binding fresh and crackly. If I knew, I'd market it to all the frustrated kids out there and be a bajillionaire. Alas...

Throughout college, leisure reading was precluded by the always-looming need to read one massive text book or another. I read a lot of peer-reviewed journals in college -- devoured them. I believe that, even including 6 week Christmas breaks and 15 week summer vacations, the only things I read for pleasure were: the Harry Potter series, Wicked, and Son of a Witch.

And big-girl literature is quite different from otherwise-girl literature. I'm sure of any list of top children's books would be much more familiar to me. For instance, I read the Newbery Award winners from 1996, 1995, 1994, 1992, 1990, 1987, 1986, 1978, 1976, 1973, 1971, 1963, 1961, 1949, 1945 (areyoueffingkiddingme?), 1944, 1942, 1940, 1938 (my grandmother always bought me a Newbery Medal winner), and 1936. I stopped being a "child" in 1998 and so have read 1/3 of all the Newbery Medal winners of my time. Which is not to say that the Newbery Medal is the be-all and end-all (I'm sure the relative merits of this award and that list are very contentious in some circles), but for pete's sake, I was a well-read child and I expected to find myself a well-read young adult!

And yet, from the lists I set down for myself, my "50" may not be any of the following: Animal Farm (#31, R#20), Lord of the Flies (#41, R#25), The Call of the Wild (#88, R#75), The Lord of the Rings (R#4), To Kill a Mockingbird (R#5), The Handmaid's Tale (R#53). I have excluded six novels out of a combined 120+. SIX.

On the bright side, I may be an ignorant, ill-read troll of a suburbanite, but at least my options are open.

I think my friend pulled A Prayer for Owen Meany off the shelf in the family room, because she applies herself to leisure reading and is always yanking books off of shelves. There are a few books of each other's we've had so long that we can't remember where they originated. I was putting away her early-morning selections and picked up Owen Meany, and started to read it. Don't worry, I won't spoil it. And take care you don't skip ahead or do something silly like read the Wikipedia article. You need to follow the rules to read Owen Meany, or risk losing the impact of it. So I plodded through it, and an unfortunately-timed cold, which has dovetailed beautifully with my raging pollen allergies, has made me loathe to leave the house. And so today, I finished it. This is my first encounter with John Irving, and I appreciated his affection for New England and old Yankee mannerisms. The way he describes Johnny's grandmother, as if he were doing so to people who had never met a Yankee in their life, made me feel a little less guilty about appreciating it. Perhaps there are indeed people out there who aren't so familiar with New England as to have their preconceived notions. Preppiness, and an appreciation for it that isn't wholly based on the (entirely understandable) love of J. Crew, is comforting to me. I have heard that this theme, his adulation of prep schools (the man grew up in Exeter), Labrador retrievers, and New Hampshire do wear on the reader after six or seven novels with the same throbbing undercurrent, but that is, I think, humanizing. It wasn't until JK Rowling that I understood that a novelist had to make up a universe...make up opinions, tendencies, uhg, all those things about myself that color my world. How is someone able to shed it? Perhaps no one can, or perhaps I just love to proselytize too much.

I liked the main character. He was so refreshingly devoid of self-pity. No, wrong word. Everybody loves an underdog story, right? To reflect this, most characters in novels have something against them. Yes, we want to see them overcome those obstacles, but somehow I doubt that life is about congratulating yourself for overcoming your perceived setbacks. Johnny is an illegitimate child whose mother dies when he's very young. But the novel is not ripe with the poignance of missing her (regret), it's filled with how much he loved her. It's filled with how much he loved his Grandmother, Dan, Hester, and Owen. A Prayer for Owen Meany, as a work of fiction, has a happy ending.

How lovely :)