It's confusing to jump back in time from Johnny's youth to 1987, only to hear him moan about the Reagan regime and loneliness. I'm not sure if the pace of the novel is an attempt at non-linearity or if he genuinely struggled with his ideas, but for five hundred pages, Johnny's inner conflict with patriotism stays unrelated with the story and makes him a nagging necessity, more than a plus to the story. In that sense, it's a pretty smart set-up by Irving. Even if Owen is the novel's main attraction. So that's the thing, Johnny is supposed to be the conflicted one, not Owen. The point of A Prayer For Owen Meany to him, was that you have to be a believer to witness a miracle and the six-hundred-something pages of his books are the metamorphosis of Johnny Wheelwright into that believer. Because prophets are always right, so Mr. And it was meant that he would be irritatingly right every single time. So the question is: was Owen Meany meant to be a Christ-like figure? According to John Irving's afterword, yes. He follows Owen wherever he goes, gets into whatever plans he organizes and shows really poor critical thinking.yeah, until Owen teaches him how to. Johnny is a pathetic excuse for a narrator, he cannot think by himself and cannot give one ounce of intellectual opposition to his little buddy. He recalls his memories with Owen Meany, like an apostle the teachings of Christ, and it's annoying as hell. See where I'm going with this? The narrator is Owen's best friend, Johnny Wheelwright, who exiled himself from the U.S voluntarily, to teach literature in a school in Toronto. The only person that tries to pick a fight with him in the novel ends up with a broken finger and a bitten foot. He's abnormally smart, charismatic and nobody ever disliked him. But he later grows to be five foot tall, so what do I know? Being a midget is the only problem Owen ever had. A very small one if you believe the first pages of the novel, like a primordial dwarf. And every occasion conflict seems to arise, the title character takes on himself to ruin the day. The main problem I have with this novel is that it's really safe, borderline not challenging. A Prayer With Owen Meany addresses a very little number of those issues. Wikipedia even has a grid of those, novel by novel. Friends and reviewers of all sorts had billed Irving as this 'fucked up writer' who deals with extremely difficult themes, such as rape, pedophilia, absent parents, incest, etc. I expected to fall in love with, what many consider to be, John Irving's magnum opus. It's cute as a button, it's by no means a dumb novel and it carries a message of hope (somewhat). It's easy to fall in love with A Prayer For Owen Meany.

A prayer for owen meany book review