Book 38: A Prayer for Owen Meany
Written by John Irving
I don’t know how old I was when I first read A Prayer for Owen Meany - but I remember reading it with my Mom. I think we listened to the audiobook together. It wasn’t a typical book for either of us, although we loved Irving. The book is frequently featured on Christian reading lists and has been described as “a novel about faith.” After rereading it this week, I think that characterization is too simple, or rather too many readers have taken liberties to simplify Irving’s intentions. In an interview he shared that:
In writing A Prayer for Owen Meany, I asked myself a fairly straightforward question — namely, what would it take to make a believer out of me? The answer is that I would have to meet someone like Owen Meany. If I’d had Johnny Wheelwright’s experience in that novel, I would probably be a believer too. But I haven’t had that experience — I only imagined it.1
The reason my mom and I loved the book so many years ago and the reason I still love it now revolves around the novel’s questions, not its conclusions. At its core, A Prayer for Owen Meany is about the tenuous distinctions between damage and sacrifice, friendship and betrayal. Faith fits into this puzzle only tangentially, challenging us as readers to ask ourselves how we relate to tragedy and survive it.
Favorite Passages:
Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
Mr. Merrill was most appealing because he reassured us that doubt was the essence of faith, and not faith’s opposite.
Ever since the Christmas of ’53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving—Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who’s not home.
https://www.denverpost.com/2009/04/02/john-irving-on-religion-sports-and-owen-meany/