The only novels even remotely similar to A Prayer for Owen Meany that come to mind (and they only came after considerable skulling) are little-known ones: King Windom, by John Farris The Big Eye, by Max Ehrlich. Novels dealing with the supernatural and paranormal have become so popular they now constitute a genre unto themselves, but novels dealing with faith and miracles - specifically Christian faith and Christian miracles - have always been something of a rarity in America. Except maybe we would, because John Irving has created his own small miracle in A Prayer for Owen Meany. And in an age where faith has been replaced by carbon-dating, MTV and televangelists of the Pat Robertson stripe, we wouldn't know a miracle if one walked up to us and bit us on the nose.
The point of A Prayer for Owen Meany is simple and direct: miracles do not create faith faith creates miracles. The reader's initial lack of belief is part of the writer's thesis. He tells his friend and biographer, John Wheelwright, that "YOUR MOTHER HAS THE BEST BREASTS OF ALL THE MOTHERS." Nonetheless, there is a great deal about Owen Meany that is not. He gets an erection when the Sunday School teacher kisses him on the lips before the annual Nativity Pageant (in which he, naturally, plays the Christ Child). Owen Meany smokes cigarettes and drinks beer. Owen Meany speaks in capitals instead of the red letters of your grandmother's Bible. If you find yourself choking at the idea of Jesus growing up in a small New Hampshire town during the '50s and '60s, that's all right. From the odd circumstances of his birth to the even odder circumstances of his heroic final act in this remarkable novel, Owen Meany is used in grandly Christlike fashion. "HE WAS USED," Owen - who speaks only in capital letters - says. Owen's view of the life and death of Jesus Christ is simple, brutally direct (Owen, we quickly discover, is a direct and brutal kind of guy), and just three words long. No one has ever done Christ in the way John Irving does Him in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I suppose it's possible to be appalled by such novelistic license, but I was filled with delighted amazement at the idea.
The hero of John Irving's seventh novel (and he is a hero Irving begins by quoting Leon Bloy: "Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig") isn't just a Christ figure he appears to be a blood relative.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I could hear a chorus of intellectual groans: "Not another Christ figure!" Not to worry. $19.95 IT IS PROBABLY not my job to wonder if John Irving has set himself up for a colossal critical pasting by writing A Prayer for Owen Meany, but I would be less than honest if I did not begin by saying the idea had occurred to me. A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY By John Irving Morrow.
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