Prior to the publication of The World According to Garp in 1979, John Irving was an almost unknown but relatively highly regarded purveyor of serious fiction with a darkly comic bent and a much greater than average propensity for at least one of his characters being a wrestler. The comedy and the wrestling remained fully intact in the brave new world of those familiar with Garp, but Irving would forever lose his status as an unknown quantity.
Sometimes a novel comes out of nowhere that suddenly seems to be everywhere. It had happened just a few years earlier with a potboiler thriller about shark menacing a small island community off the New England coast. Sometime about the episodic, up and down and distinctly American tale hooked into Americans as they seemed to be just about through trying to make sense of the turbulence of the late 1960’s and 1970’s and settle down once into a comfortable acceptance of traditional values with a Yuppie sensibility. It wasn’t just the title character: Garp had one of the truly memorable mothers in recent America fiction and featured what was probably the first transsexual character in novel that wasn’t specifically about the sexuality of that character.
Garp became such a huge part of the collective conversation when published that part of the fun of being familiar with the novel was playing the guessing game of who would eventually play the lovably idiosyncratic character surrounded by a cast of friends and acquaintances far more eccentric than himself. Nearly every actor in America around 30 years old probably felt he was born to play the part of the glue that keeps the fragile world around from collapsing under the weight of the world. About the last actor on earth that seems born to play Garp was, almost ironically, the hottest thing in Hollywood whose explosion into the American consciousness weirdly coincided with that of Garp. And yet, it was precisely the most manic and eccentric celebrity in the world who step into shoes of the most grounded character in the book when it was finally adapted for the film in 1982.
The World According to Garp was nominated for a National Book Award in 1979 and won the paperback edition in 1980. Thrust fully into the limelight, Irving has gone to published many more successful novels as well as winning an Oscar for adapting the screenplay for his novel The Cider House Rules.
