In a brilliantly conceived marketing strategy based on an unexpected display of pure logic cloaked in absurdity, the film adaptation of John Irving’s The World According to Garp featured a shocking accident in which a plane crashes into a house. This event causes Garp to observe that it is the absolute perfect time to buy that particular house because, after all, what in the world are the odds that another plane will ever crash into it? In one single moment the marketing department conveyed what has long been considered one of the absolutely essential elements to the writing of—and the unexpected popularity of—a novel by a previously adored by critics and absolutely ignored by the public: that life is but a series of random incidents and the wisest among us are those who know when to capitalize on the odds.
The novel was published to low expectations in 1978, the very same year that an unknown stand-up comedian was cast to play an alien in a dream episode of the hit sitcom Happy Days. Surprising everyone, the novel did not just overshoot those expectations, but became a publishing phenomenon. To the surprise of nearly as many, the actor cast to play the alien connected with the sitcom’s audience to the point that the dream episode was retrofitted to make it only seem as if the wild alien was a figment of somebody’s subconscious; in fact, he was very much a real alien named Mork. Not coincidentally, the unknown actor shot to stardom playing Mork in a spin-off of Happy Days and his first big time movie role shocked everyone: the kinetic, off-the-wall, walking surrealist painting named Robin Williams was going to play the most normal and well-adjusted character in The World According to Garp: T.S. Garp himself.
After all these years, it is finally time to dismiss the concept that the book is about the randomness of life. Its robust cast of characters that includes an unmarried woman who essentially—well, actually there is no essentially about it—an unmarried woman who rapes a brain-damaged soldier for the purpose of impregnating herself, a transsexual former NFL tight end, a teenager who was way ahead of the ABDL curve, a fictional character who can only walk on his hands and, of course, Ellen James who greatest indignity is perhaps being mutilated for life by rapists too stupid to understand that merely cutting out the tongue of your victim is not enough to stop her from identifying you. Crazy cast of characters there and, boy, does a bunch of weird stuff happen to them that eventually, inexorably, and in some indeterminate way bind them all together around the enigma who is not enigmatic at all: T.S. Garp.
The final words of the novel—justly famous—sums up that infamous sense of the novel seemingly being a meditation on the absurdity of random chances of fate: “But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.” The implication being, of course, that no matter what strange threads bind us together in the fabric of life, it all ends up in the same place: the dump. Life happens and then you die so quit trying to figure it out and just hang on for the ride.
It’s a fake, however. The story is funny, absurdly so and biting and corrosive in its black humor. It is tragic, but the tragedy of The World According to Garp is tempered by that late 20th century gift to 21st century fictional entertainment: irony. In a world where irony trumps sincerity, tragedy can never fully exist. And so that it is why despite all the weirdness and ugliness (and you better be prepared for it because there are some truly ugly things that must be read if you want to get to the end of this novel) it is still almost always and without reservations referred to at least in some tangential way as a comic novel - except it’s not.
Aside from the reverse rape which produces the titular protagonist and aside from the nauseating series of events which make Ellen James famous against her wishes and aside from the truly touching sub-story of Roberta, there is really just one moment of genuine tragedy in the novel that lingers. And lingers. And lingers. It lingers so long because it is the one moment when the reader is forced to wonder—or question—did Irving go too far this one time? The brutality suffered against Ellen does not devastate because she becomes empowered by it and—though she doesn’t desire it—so are others. And Roberta’s story is touching and a little sad and almost threatens to veer off into tragedy along the way. And, of course, there is Garp’s own end. But these things are not tragic precisely because there is a sense of chance and the random quality of fate about them.
Not so the death of Walt. The death of the younger son of the Garps is not just tragedy, it is senseless. It is not random. It is, in fact, almost predictable. Certainly the way that Irving presents it contains more than an artful sense that it is somehow predetermined despite the shocking unexpectedness of it. Chapter Thirteen—“Walt Catches Cold”—is arguably the single greatest thing John Irving has ever written. It is about as flawless as anyone could possibly want or expect. And yet it is also the cruelest thing in the novel; a novel infamous for its acts of cruelty. In this instance, however, it is not the characters who are responsible for the cruelty, it is the author.
The final eight paragraphs—some are just a sentence long—do not seem like the kind of stuff that is going to make a reader sick to their stomach while it is taking place. It is only afterward when the consequences of the thrill ride which has been final few pages of Chapter Thirteen are made grotesquely clear that the muscles in the stomach begin to tighten, the mind starts to wander and the subconscious becomes a bubbling cauldron in which a witch’s brew is stirring. By the typing that he’d done, Irving made something wicked come.
The death of Walt gives a lie to the longstanding idea that The World According to Garp is a comic novel about utterly unpredictable moments of random chance in which planes crash into just the one house that a wise man is considering buying at that moment in time. The events leading to Walt’s death and his older brother’s horrific disfigurement are not random. They are the acts of cruelty that humans perpetrate upon one another. This world of Garp is not one in which the monsters is the unknown, but rather the one in which predators feed upon the trust of the ones they claim to love the most, and that is the terminal disease infecting humanity.
