Love, Art and the Last Puritan

By R.Z.Sheppard

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving; Dutton; 437pages; $10.95

Why is an artist like a bear on a unicycle? John Irving does not have an answer; he does not even ask the question. Yet a bear does pedal through his fourth novel, in a haunting story caged within the main narrative. Since Irving's first novel was called Setting Free the Bears, the ursine connection is not inappropriate. Bears, like artists, can elicit both fascination and fear. Both can be primitive, matted, smelly and wild, and both can learn tricks, be domesticated, cleaned up and made cuddly.

T.S. Garp, the writer-hero of The World According to Garp, is bearlike. He is short, powerfully built, a former schoolboy wrestler, a man dedicated to physical fitness, writing fiction, cooking and keeping house while his wife teaches literature to arrogant, randy college students. Garp is also fiercely protective of his two children: "There was so much to worry about, when worrying about children, and Garp worried so much about everything; at times, especially in these throes of insomnia, Garp thought himself to be psychologically unfit for parenthood. Then he worried about that, too, and felt all the more anxious for his children. What if their most dangerous enemy turned out to be him?"

Night thoughts turn to prophecy in a series of chain-reaction ironies that Irving controls with such authority that the most bizarre male sexual fear and the most terrifying parental obsession are fused in a few moments of comedy and horror. Yes, something awful happens to Garp's children; but to have one's emotions manipulated as skillfully, one would have to go back to the riding accident suffered by Tony and Brenda Last's son in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust.

The World According to Garp is a long family novel, spanning four generations and two continents, crammed with incidents, characters, feelings and craft. The components of black comedy and melodrama, pathos and tragedy, mesh effortlessly in a tale that can also be read as a commentary on art and the imagination.

Garp himself begins in an act of highly spiced imagination. During World War II, his mother, Nurse Jenny Fields, climbs into bed with a ball-turret gunner who has been lobotomized by a piece of flak. The gunner, Technical Sergeant Garp, dies shortly afterward, leaving only the initials of rank for his son's first name. For Jenny, her one and only sexual experience is a calculated insemination consistent with her independent nature. As she writes in A Sexual Suspect, the autobiography that makes her famous, "I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone. That made me a sexual suspect. Then I wanted a baby, but I didn't want to have to share my body or my life to have one. That made me a sexual suspect too."

The novel is strategically seeded with role reversals. Garp, raised on the campus of a New England boys' school where his mother is head nurse, exhibits strong maternal instincts. When his wife decides to have an affair, she behaves with all the distracting caution of the philandering commuter. The most striking sexual suspect is Roberta Muldoon, formerly Robert, a transsexual who once played tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles. She is Garp's closest friend and squash partner.

Though Irving never plays these characters for easy laughs, they all display a humor founded on the sorrowful awareness that life is flux and the soul of man but "dreams and vapors." Garp is a reader of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. He is also one of the last puritans, pondering lust as the enemy of order and family, and sloth as the bane of the artist. Oddly, so is experience. As events overtake him, he finds it harder to write: "Garp could now be truthful only by remembering, and that method--as distinct from imagining--was not only psychologically harmful to him but far less fruitful."

Such insights give Irving's characters an intense humanity that raises them far above the agitprop of radical feminism and militant homosexualism. Jenny Fields and her son are two exceptional people working out their destinies in a world that consistently misunderstands them. Jenny's bestseller attracts a cult of fanatic man-hating women who have cut out their tongues to commemorate a celebrated rape victim. As an artist Garp must defend against those who confuse autobiography and imagination. Eventually both mother and son inflame the passions of the emotionally maimed and suffer the classic fates of saints and poets.

The World According to Garp is an extraordinary work whose achievement is echoed in Garp's own discovery "that when you are writing something, every thing seems related to everything else." That is easier said than written, but John Irving has written it. At 36, he moves into the front rank of America's young novelists.

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