Her introduction to prostitutes by her son. Her use of a wounded soldier to get pregnant with the titular character T.S. There's Jenny Fields' disdain for men and what she calls lust, upon which she builds a movement. In any case, the disturbing content in Garp has never been so much the sex, but the politics and attitudes surrounding sex and gender. In fact, even when Garp first came out you could read more explicit and outlandish accounts of sex in the novels of literary figures Gore Vidal, Philip Roth and Norman Mailer, not to mention the steamy potboilers of bestselling writers like Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins and the ilk in that era. Read it today though-when the bestselling lists are topped by books about sadomasochism and psychopaths-and you may find it far less so. Largely it was the sexual content that people once found shocking in Irving's novel. I'd been disturbed earlier because it addressed serious human issues differently from much of the latter twentieth-century literature I'd become comfortable with. It had seemed sensationalist, cruelly laughing about tragic lives, and arbitrarily, by turns, both supporting and mocking feminism and other progressive causes.īut I had been very young then and when I re-read Garp, with a few more years behind me, I found it was none of those things.
And there is no greater evidence for it on his side than in his breakthrough 1976 novel, The World According to Garp.Īs I've outlined elsewhere (see the John Irving commentary), I had indeed been appalled-but not in a good way-by that novel when I'd first read it. Once you get over the shock of discovering literary icon Irving and horrormeister King are mutual admirers, you might realize the truth of Irving's statement. You can find online a video of John Irving discussing how both he and Stephen King have striven not to please, but to appall.
0 kommentar(er)
