A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

(A review in brief, first published in Goodreads.com)

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had a wonderful experience with this book, but it took a circuitous journey to get me there. John Irving is among my favorite writers and A Prayer for Owen Meany is often considered his most popular and accessible book. It is also a profoundly religious book, although some might say (wrongly, in my view) sacrilegious. It's John Irving after all, so prepare yourself for a dazzling ride into the far corners of Irving's imaginative universe.

Nonetheless, I have tried three or four times to read this book and always got derailed. It just didn't grab me. I loved Garp, Son of the Circus, Cider House Rules and others, but Meany eluded me.

The first sentence of the book is this:

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

Irving says he always writes the last sentence first and once written it never changes. The first sentence, however, changes many times, right up to the final manuscript. He says that the first sentence in Meany is his favorite first sentence in all his books. It is also a sentence that says everything you need to know about the book. Don't worry, however, it is not a spoiler.

I think it is the "wrecked voice" that was the problem. In the book Owen Meany's dialogue is always formatted in all caps. That seemed off-putting to me for some reason. Then I read where someone had listened to the book in audio format (on Audible.com) and the narrator used a high pitched voice when reading Meany's spoken words. It was screechy and annoying, but that is the point, after all. It seemed just perfect.

I now have read A Prayer for Owen Meany with my ears. There are scenes in this book that I will never forget. I don't know yet if I will hear them or see them. More important is whether I will FEEL them, and I am confident I will.


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