A Prayer for Owen Meany

A Prayer for Owen Meany - by John Irving

A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of those books that sucks you in.  It sucks you in deep into the narrative, the characters, the personalities, and you simply don’t want to let go.  This is not a fast moving book.  Not at all.  But since you enjoy being sucked into it, this is not a deterrent.  In fact, it’s just the opposite.  Once you’re into this world, you almost wish you could stay there forever.  This is the definition of great writing. 

Our protagonist is John Wheelwright, and this is his story.  He’s in his mid-forties as he narrates his tale, which begins as a young boy in post-war America.  He lives a rather affluent life, growing up in New Hampshire with his single mother and grandmother.  There’s also his best friend Owen.  Owen is one of those people that seems as though he could only exist in a story.  He’s rather an odd character.  He’s remarkably small for his age, quite goofy looking, and has a speech impediment that leaves him with a consistent, high pitched whine of a voice.  Every time we read dialogue uttered by Owen, author John Irving displays it in ALL CAPS.  This in itself is annoying, but I guess that’s the point.  Irving wants to remind his readers that whenever Owen Meany talks, it’s a bit of an annoyance and takes a while for others to get used to.

You would think that such a character would be mercilessly picked on and bullied, but it’s quite the opposite.  This little guy is a borderline genius and seems to be more knowledgeable than anyone else around.  If he was 6’2’’ and handsome, he could rival John F Kennedy in a popularity contest.  We follow John and Owen from the time they’re small boys up until their mid-twenties when the Vietnam War is in full swing.  We go very deep into the many events of their lives.  There are plenty of readers, I would imagine, that would find all of this detail pointless and think “Get on with the plot”.  But it’s really hard to fully enjoy this plot without all of the detail.

It’s seems as though Owen knows his destiny.  Throughout his childhood, he sees what God’s intention is for him.  He doesn’t quite understand it, but he knows it.  This doesn’t make life for Owen any easier.  Think about it.  Would you really want to be convinced that YOU knew the exact date of your death and have reoccurring dreams that point this event out to you explicitly?  Although he shares this impending doom with John and other characters, no one really believes him.  How could they?  So calmer minds try to convince poor Owen that he’s imagining the whole thing. When we finally arrive at the event that Owen feels is being foretold by God, there never seems to be that huge of a revelation.  Again, it’s not the plot that is necessarily so enthralling, but rather the story itself. 

This is one of those classic books that has never been made into a movie, and I’m not sure it ever should – or could.  Owen is simply one of those characters that we might have trouble believing in had anyone tried to visualize what such a human being would look and sound like.  In other words, he seems quite unbelievable – except when John Irving writes about him.

As I mentioned, this book is a retrospective story.  John Wheelwright is a high school professor in his forties when he tells his tale.  I felt like we jumped around a bit too much to the present day.  When we fast-forward at brief intervals to 1987, it seems like merely an excuse for the author to criticize Ronald Reagan’s handling of Iran-Contra.  They (John Wheelwright and John Irving) obviously hate the man.  Perhaps these diversions are meant to illustrate just how empty Wheelwright’s life is now without Owen.  There doesn’t seem to be anything remarkable about John’s latter day life.  He’s quite the boring character.  He doesn’t feel despondent however.  In fact, having lived a life with Owen Meany as a best friend for so much of his early life makes him feel quite blessed.  Once we’ve experienced a portion of our life with someone like Owen, how can anything possibly top that?

An excellent story.  Very unbelievable, and not for everyone, but none of this hindered my experience.  Well deserving of the “Classic” moniker.

Roadside Crosses

Roadside Crosses – Jeffery Deaver

I’m not sure if I like the Kathryn Dance novels as much as I like the Lincoln Rhyme ones.  This is my second Dance novel (although she was introduced to readers as a supporting player in an earlier Rhyme book) and although I welcomed her with enthusiasm originally, I’m now not sure how it might work out in future novels.  I don’t have a problem with <I>her</I> at all, yet it’s her “gift” that doesn’t translate particularly well.

For Kathryn Dance, she’s an expert in the field of kinesics, the study of body language and nonverbal communication.  In other words, she’s so dang good at what she does, she can tell if a person is being deceitful after having a five-minute conversation with them.  What I have found is that Deaver will use Dance, along with her gift, when he needs to quickly advance the plot in a certain direction.  It always seems a tad contrived.  Dance interrogates a subject.  She knows the subject is lying.  The subject eventually breaks down and confesses, tells her the real truth, and the plot can then advance.

This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, but what I found myself asking was “If she can do this with everyone, how is it that key people in the story seem to escape her scrutiny under her radar?”  If you know Jeffery Deaver, you know that nothing in his stories is as it seems.  Every time you’re sure the story is going in the direction that it should be proceeding, Deaver will throw you a hard curve ball, and the people that were presumably guilty were actually innocent all along. So then, some of the people that you thought were innocent, were the ones that were actually committing the crimes the whole time under our nose.

Since these individuals are key players, why can’t Dance use her expertise in kinesics to uncover their behaviors earlier on in the story?  Sure, all of us are duped by Deaver’s 180 degree turns, but Kathryn Dance is supposed to be better than that.  This left me a bit cold.  Of course, like Lincoln Rhyme, we get to learn all sorts of nuances about Dance including her troubled past, her current family, her single motherhood, her dating partners, etc. etc. etc.  This is supposed to enrich the story, but I thought it gummed up the works a bit too much.

This is the third Jeffery Deaver novel that I have read where the main character is the computer.  Or, more specifically, how people can use a computer to achieve evil motives – either intentionally or unintentionally.  This story explores two facets of such technology.  The first is how people get lost in their own virtual words by becoming virtual characters and spending their entire lives being lost in their fantasy world.  It seems as though such a world is much better than their real world.  Unfortunately, after a while, such individuals lose sight and have trouble distinguishing the real world from their fantasy world.

The other facet is something that has become all too common over the last few years (this story was written in 2009, when such a phenomenon was in its infancy) and that is using the online community to argue with complete strangers on blogs and avenues such as social media.  People can get ugly when they hide under the anonymity of the world wide web.  If you don’t believe me, try this:  next time there’s a story on one of the major news sites such as CNN and/or FOX that focuses on either politics or religion, take a few minutes to view the “comments” section at the bottom of the story.  People get real ugly and real nasty with each other in a hurry.  Personally, I can easily avoid this, but even on my Facebook page, I have friends that can’t seem to resist posting links to jabs about their least favorite political personality.  I’ve never quite understood this behavior.

Anyway, all of this to say that in this story, there are negative things posted on a particular blog that is hosted by a local resident.  The atmosphere is so negative that someone is out murdering people.  That’s really all you need to know about the plot.  Dance and her team must put a stop to it.  As we “learn” about these behaviors, the author’s descriptions and examples of such behavior are pretty juvenile.  Real people don’t act like these characters in this story – even when these real people are in non-real worlds.  Since the episodes he writes about were still somewhat of a novelty back in 2009, I can give him a bit of a pass for this.

Not one of my favorite Deaver books, but it was still a page turner, and I can’t help but wonder if part of the problem is that I’ve read about 15 Deaver books in the past 3 years.  Maybe I just need a break.  Good book, but he’s done much better.

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism – by Doris Kearns Goodwin

 

 This book was long.  Good Lord, was this book long.  It’s not that it wasn’t good, it’s just that it was…..long.  Whenever you see a movie in a movie theater, there’s probably a limit of what you can take.  Most people would probably hit that limit around 3 hours.  No matter how good the movie is, after you’ve sat in your seat for that long, you start to squirm and feel very uncomfortable.  You really just want the stupid thing to be over.  This is exactly how I felt reading this book.  Now, I borrowed the large print edition from my local library, which was over 1250 pages (with no index nor source notes).  I know that being a large print book made it look and feel a bit heftier than it was, but it still felt humongous.  It’s not an easy book to carry around either.  I felt like I was toting around an unabridged dictionary.  All of this to say that this book should have been about 300 pages shorter than it was. 

Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of my favorite historians.  She never limits herself to writing about a particular person, but yet a person surrounded by curious surroundings that influence the person’s actions as well as the course of history.  When she wrote about Abraham Lincoln in “Team of Rivals”, for instance, she wasn’t writing a straight up biography, but rather how his cabinet was combined of individuals that didn’t really like one and other (including Lincoln) and how his personality and leadership style managed to achieve harmony in the cabinet, and successfully lead the country through one of the most calamitous periods of its history.

Her main topic for this book is the progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century and how president Theodore Roosevelt and his Secretary of War William Taft (who would succeed Roosevelt as President) managed to combat and defeat many of the one-sided strongholds of the country’s economy.  Although many have argued that the progressive movement of late has gone too far, you certainly couldn’t make that argument when looking back at this particular time in history.  You had very very few of the very rich, and then you had multitudes of poor living in extreme poverty.  Back then, there were no government programs to help anybody, nor was there any regulation in how products and consumables were manufactured.  The examples listed are quite scary, and the majority of citizens faced insurmountable odds just trying to survive.

Had Goodwin focused more directly on this crisis, this could have been a much stronger book.  The problem is, she spends an inordinate amount of time being diverted to too many issues, too many personalities, and too much detail.  In fact, you could argue she’s actually writing about three or four books all in one here.  We have a very detailed account of President Roosevelt and of President Taft.  We get histories of both men, including histories of their wives, their parents, their siblings etc.  We learn how they start out great friends, yet end up bitter rivals in the arena of politics. Again, had the author chose these areas to focus on, the book would have been a more satisfying experience.

But, no, since we need to focus on the progressive movement, she feels compelled to introduce a “third” character to this story, the liberal McClures magazine that came into existence around this time.  This is definitely an important part of the overall story, since the magazine went a long way in helping the leadership achieve their goals, but for some reason, again, the author feels compelled to give us extensive biographies on several of the key people that worked for the magazine.  And on and on and on and on.

Once we get to the last few hundred pages of the book, we read in (way too much) detail all of the minutia that eventually led to (now former) President Roosevelt’s and President Taft’s acrimony.  It gets so bad that Roosevelt feels compelled to run for office again as a third party candidate against the incumbent Taft and Democratic challenger Woodrow Wilson.  Again, detail after detail after detail is discussed ad-nauseum in reliving the 1912 election.  Perhaps I was just tired at this point.  It’s never a good thing (for me, anyway) when you have to force yourself to finish a book.  I had to give myself goals, such as “today I must read at least 50 pages…..”

I’m complaining an awful lot in this review, so I must reiterate that I still enjoyed the book.  I just felt it could have been much better had it been much shorter.  The author also really likes to use the word “sanguine”.

NOTE: If you want to read more about Theodore Roosevelt, I highly recommend Edmund Morris’ trilogy.  Most of what is written in this book about TR, you can also read about from Morris’ work and it was much more satisfying.