Prose Roundup: The World According to Garp (1978) by John Irving

JAN 03, 2026

Prose roundups are posts where I run through the noteworthy snippets of books and short stories not yet in the public domain (that therefore can't be made into visual novels yet). The snippets are listed chronologically, grouped by chapters, and may contain spoilers up to their respective locations in their works.

1. Boston Mercy

Technical Sergeant Garp, the late gunner whose familiarity with violent death cannot be exaggerated, served with the Eighth Air Force—the air force that bombed the Continent from England.

Ooh, a funny novel set in the Allied air command. This 600-page book wastes no time breaking new literary ground. (To be fair, the book does move on from the Catch-22 plagiarism relatively quickly. But at the same time: Irving, your book's opening just makes me want to read a different book.)

And she found little gimmicks to help her remember their names and their disasters. Thus: Private Jones fell off his bones, Ensign Potter stopped a whopper, Corporal Estes lost his testes, Captain Flynn has no skin, Major Longfellow is short on answers.

Irving rhymes "testes" with a character "Estes" (only mention) to pad out the bit to five examples. He only needed three!

2. Blood and Blue

She finished such books promptly, but she had nothing to say about them. In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange.

Whether that's strange depends a lot on the book. Maybe she just finished In Dubious Battle.

“What do you hear the boys call me?” the dean asked. “‘Mad Dog’?” asked Garp.

Have you no shame Irving, stealing from The Simpsons?

3. What He Wanted to Be When He Grew Up

“Writers do not read for fun,” Garp would write, later, speaking for himself.

As this book descends further into that always-masturbatory affair of writers writing characters who are also writers, Irving takes the time out to make sure we know Garp is only speaking for himself here. (Remember: don't ask Irving if the book is autobiographical.)

She was the brains of the family, he was fond of saying—and she had her mother’s fine looks, which he never mentioned.

Woah, woah, slow down there professor. A chick who's smart and good-looking?

“Oh, Jesus,” Garp groaned. “His daughter wrestles?” “No, she reads a lot,” Jenny said, approvingly.

A close one: we all agree women shouldn't wrestle. (And they shouldn't be allowed to read either.)

“She’s only fifteen, too. And she wears glasses,” she added, hypocritically. After all, she knew what she thought of glasses; maybe Garp liked them, too. “They’re from Iowa,” she added, and felt she was being a more terrible snob than those hated dandies who thrived in the Steering School community. “God, wrestling,” Garp groaned, again, and Jenny felt relieved that he had passed on from the subject of Helen. Jenny was embarrassed at herself for how much she clearly objected to the possibility. The girl is pretty, she thought—though not in an obvious way; and don’t young boys like only obvious girls? And would I prefer it if Garp were interested in one of those? As for those kinds of girls, Jenny had her eye on Cushie Percy—a little too saucy with her mouth, a little too slack about her appearance; and should a fifteen-year-old of Cushman Percy’s breeding be so developed already? Then Jenny hated herself for even thinking of the word breeding.

Look Irving, I like that you gave Iowa a shout-out, but slow down with the damned italics everywhere.

4. Graduation

She wore dark green knee socks and a gray flannel skirt, with pleats; often her sweater, always a dark and solid color, matched her knee socks, and always her long dark hair was up, twirled in a braid on top of her head, or complexly pinned. She had a wide mouth with very thin lips and she never wore lipstick.

This character is just Daria Morgendorffer!

When he was at Steering he read Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” thirty-four times. He also read D. H. Lawrence’s “The Man Who Loved Islands” twenty-one times; he felt ready to read it again, now.

My favorite part of re-reading short stories is counting the exact number of times I've re-read them.

And while we're doing exact counts: five mentions of Joseph Conrad in this book, always brought up in a gushing way, no matter who the character is. It's almost as if, as far as literary tastes go, they all have the same voice. (That hospital-bound injured student athlete reading Heart of Darkness just loves frame narratives.)

5. In the City Where Marcus Aurelius Died

In truth, Jenny would not have been mistaken for a prostitute by most people, but it is hard to say exactly what she looked like.

Well you're the author, so… (Remember Irving, DUET: Difficult-for-Us/Easy-for-Them — it applies to code, it applies to writing.)

6. The Pension Grillparzer

Charlotte was the color of the dull ice on the brackish Steering River.

I too have seen the Iowa River in Iowa City (nice campus!). I'm still not sure what color this is meant to be.

She did not tell him that she was referring to Jenny’s book, A Sexual Suspect; it was 1,158 manuscript pages long. Though Helen would later agree with Garp that it was no literary jewel, she had to admit that it was a very compelling story.

I call foul on the book being ~300k words long in the context of how the rest of the plot develops. To the extent that books ever become cultural sensations, it's not from books of that length. It's simply impossible. It's— wait, how long is Garp?

…

Huh, I'll be damned. (There really was nothing better to do in the 70s than read — what a terrible decade.)

7. More Lust

“The new fiction is interested in language and in f-f-form, I guess,” Tinch said. “But I don’t understand what it’s really about. Sometimes it’s about it-it-itself, I think,” Tinch said. “About itself?” Garp said. “It’s sort of fiction about fi-fi-fiction,” Tinch told him.

Irving, you know what other long-ass book with linguistic and metafictional elements got published in the 70s? Gödel, Escher, Bach. And you're no Hofstadter, so knock it off.

She was taken as the right voice at the right time, but Jenny Fields, sitting whitely in her nurse’s uniform—in the restaurant where John Wolf took only his favorite writers—felt discomfort at the word feminism.

Three appearances of the adverb "whitely" in this book. Now I'm no Stephen King grouch, but at the same time: really?

She would rise and say, “This is right.” Or, sometimes, “This is wrong”—depending on the occasion. She was the decision maker who’d made the hard choices in her own life and therefore she could be counted on to be on the right side of a woman’s problem.

I love it when books have that one character who's always right and never wrong and all the others always agree with always.

“Well, there’s a whole society of women now,” Jenny informed him, “because of what happened to Ellen James.” “What happened to her?” Garp asked. “Two men raped her when she was eleven years old,” Jenny said. “Then they cut her tongue off so she couldn’t tell anyone who they were or what they looked like. They were so stupid that they didn’t know an eleven-year-old could write. Ellen James wrote a very careful description of the men, and they were caught, and they were tried and convicted. In jail, someone murdered them.” “Wow,” Garp said. “So that’s Ellen James?” he whispered, indicating the big quiet woman with new respect. Jenny rolled her eyes again. “No,” she said. “That is someone from the Ellen James Society. Ellen James is still a child; she’s a wispy-looking little blond girl.” “You mean this Ellen James Society goes around not talking,” Garp said, “as if they didn’t have any tongues?” “No, I mean they don’t have any tongues,” Jenny said. “People in the Ellen James Society have their tongues cut off. To protest what happened to Ellen James.”

So this is obviously all terrible, and absurd, and obnoxious. And I don't think it's particularly funny in this context — instead it's just gross in that way everything from the 70s is gross. But this is the direction the plot's heading for the next 400+ pages, so strap in.

“I feel uneasy,” Garp wrote, “that my life has come in contact with so much rape.” Apparently, he was referring to the ten-year-old in the city park, to the eleven-year-old Ellen James and her terrible society—his mother’s wounded women with their symbolic, self-inflicted speechlessness. And later he would write a novel, which would make Garp more of “a household product,” which would have much to do with rape. Perhaps rape’s offensiveness to Garp was that it was an act that disgusted him with himself—with his own very male instincts, which were otherwise so unassailable. He never felt like raping anyone; but rape, Garp thought, made men feel guilty by association. In Garp’s own case, he likened his guilt for the seduction of Little Squab Bones to a rapelike situation. But it was hardly a rape.

There's a lot going on here!

• The stupid use of "apparently" in the second sentence. (Apparently according to whom?)
• Seven uses of "rape" in as many sentences.
• The novelty adjective "rapelike".
• The comical protesting-too-much nature of "He never felt like raping anyone".

This is all meant to be a comical juxtaposition of the absurd with the serious. And some of this could be funny in isolation, as Norm Macdonald bits. Maybe. Except that having it be ten- and eleven-year-olds rather dampens that humor potential. Too far.

8. Second Children, Second Novels, Second Love

“A thtudent!” Alice wailed. “A thtupid little twat!”

But here's Biggus Dickus to lighten the mood.

It was a book full of wounding dialogue and sex that left the partners smarting; sex in the book also left the partners guilty, and usually wanting more sex. This paradox was cited by several reviewers who called the phenomenon, alternately, “brilliant” and “dumb.”

The continued annoying meta-commentary aside, what exactly does Irving think a "paradox" is?

Dear Shithead, [wrote the offended party] I have read your novel. You seem to find other people’s problems very funny. I have seen your picture. With your fat head of hair I suppose you can laugh at bald persons. And in your cruel book you laugh at people who can’t have orgasms, and people who aren’t blessed with happy marriages, and people whose wives and husbands are unfaithful to each other. You ought to know that persons who have these problems do not think everything is so funny. Look at the world, shithead—it is a bed of pain, people suffering and nobody believing in God or bringing their children up right. You shithead, you don’t have any problems so you can make fun of poor people who do!

Getting ahead of the haters by showing how stupid they sound. I bet you feel stupid yourself now, reader.

9. The Eternal Husband

About the only shoes he owned were running shoes—many pairs.

About the only shoes? So…

I rather like the mundanity of the sentence actually.

10. The Dog in the Alley, the Child in the Sky

The responsibilities loomed for Garp, every time. What is the instinct in people that makes them expect something to happen? If you begin a story about a person or a dog, something must be going to happen to them. “Go on!” Walt cried impatiently.

Go f─── off here, Irving. You can't help taint your otherwise good prose by wedging in these smug writer's asides.

12. It Happens to Helen

It was in this mood, beset with trivia, that Helen encountered the smug young man slouched in the hall by her office door with the top two buttons of his nice shirt unbuttoned. The shoulders of his tweed jacket were, she noticed, slightly padded; his hair was a bit too lank, and too long, and one end of his mustache—as thin as a knife—drooped too far down at the corner of his mouth. She was not sure if she wanted to love this young man or groom him.

Heh heh… words that change meaning over time.

Helen, he knew, was reading someone else. It did not occur to Garp that she might be contemplating more than literature, but he saw with a typical writer’s jealousy that someone else’s words were keeping her up at night.

Credit where credit's due: Irving gets ahead of the reading-as-cuckoldry meme by several decades. (Writer-focused commentary can work when it's self-deprecating.)

But now he saw his chance for a little cruelty—and/or a little truth—and his eyes shone at her brightly.

Three uses of "and/or" in this book. It's a worthy (if dubious) battle, trying to make the term acceptable in professional prose.

14. The World According to Marcus Aurelius

Garp was convinced that the mainstream of his fans consisted of waifs, lonely children, retarded grownups, cranks, and only occasional members of the citizenry who were not afflicted with perverted taste.

I'll own "crank", but I quibble with the "pervert" part: it's true all writers are perverts and probably most readers too, but not most people in general.

It was in the late summer of Garp’s convalescence that The World According to Bensenhaver was begun.

Fatigue-inducing. Did Irving think he was being clever? Was this considered clever in the 70s? I refuse to believe.

The man wore cowboy boots and green suede bell-bottom pants. He was tall and chesty, though not quite as tall and chesty as Roberta Muldoon. “I’m not a dyke,” Roberta said. “Well, you’re no vestal virgin either,” the man said. “Where the fuck is Laurel?” He wore an orange T-shirt with bright green letters between his nipples.

SHAPE UP!

the letters read.

Would that I could make the visual novel for this book, if only for this character.

15. The World According to Bensenhaver

Below him a lurid turquoise pickup moved ahead with the traffic; its fenders were pockmarked, its grille bashed in and black with mashed flies and—Standish imagined—the heads of imbedded birds.

The repetition of the same beats in the inner stories as the outer is obviously intentional and obviously still irritating. Especially with how long they are: this one is 40 pages — an entire chapter! — and features the most drawn-out rape scene yet (in a book with many other competing drawn-out rape scenes).

Inspector Arden Bensenhaver, who knew a good deal about rape, announced that he had to get on with his job.

Knowing a good deal about rape may sound impressive, but recall that Cup of Gold's Captain Morgan was an "authority on rape". Your move, Irving.

Arden Bensenhaver, of course, couldn’t know that the man in the black pickup hadn’t really been alone—that, in fact, Hope Standish had been lying with her head in his lap.

Usually when an author uses "of course" in a sentence, they're being smug about something that isn't actually obvious. But in this case the "of course" is warranted — the sentence is completely redundant in the context it appears. Which is… worse?

16. The First Assassin

And John Wolf knew this: one of the first things most readers want to know is everything they can about a writer’s life. John Wolf wrote Garp: “For most people, with limited imaginations, the idea of improving on reality is pure bunk.”

To the first sentence I say: there's probably some self-selection bias going on, Irving. And to the second sentence I say: f─── off again.

“Wait and write it after I’m dead,” Helen said. Everyone laughed. “But there are only three,” John Wolf said. “What then? What happens after the three?” “I die,” Garp said. “That will make six novels altogether, and that’s enough.” Everyone laughed again.

No novel ever has earned the "everyone laughed" line. And we get two here!

Wolf was being careful; he had already let it slip that he thought The World According to Bensenhaver was an “X-rated soap opera.” Garp hadn’t seemed bothered. “Mind you, it’s awfully well written,” Wolf had said, “but it’s still, somehow, soap opera; it’s too much, somehow.” Garp had sighed. “Life,” Garp had said, “is too much, somehow. Life is an X-rated soap opera, John,” Garp had said.

The audacity of this man to call his own self-insert author's stuff "awfully well written".

The incumbent governor was in favor of all the same, swinish, stupid things. The woman running against him seemed educated and idealistic and kind; she also seemed to barely restrain her anger at the same, swinish, stupid things the governor represented.

Part of this feels tongue-in-cheek with how thick Irving's laying it on here, but then you read his introduction to the book's 40th Anniversary Edition: "Now (as of this writing) we have President Trump—a narcissistic vulgarian, a xenophobic blowhard, and a fascist bully."

Hard to say!

17. The First Feminist Funeral, and Other Funerals

“Ever since Walt died,” wrote T. S. Garp, “my life has felt like an epilogue.”

Well at least Irving's aware about when the book peaked. Though what a prick for keeping it going for another 200 pages and then rubbing that in the reader's face.

In a more interesting development, I think it was about at this point in reading that an old card fell out of the book — always a fun experience — in this case some sort of student ID:

The book not being read since 1981 seems about right.

“You didn’t miss nothin’, sweetie,” the cabby told him. “That broad broke down.” “Sally Devlin?” said Garp. “She cracked up, right on the TV,” the cabby said. “She was so flipped out over the assassination, she couldn’t control herself. She was givin’ this speech but she couldn’t get through it, you know? “She looked like a real idiot to me,” the cabby said. “She couldn’t be no governor if she couldn’t control herself no better than that.” And Garp saw the pattern of the woman’s loss emerging. Perhaps the foul incumbent governor had remarked that Ms. Devlin’s inability to control her emotions was “just like a woman.” Disgraced by her demonstration of her feelings for Jenny Fields, Sally Devlin was judged not competent enough for whatever dubious work being a governor entailed.

Why are there two separate "the cabby said" dialogue tags back-to-back. Matter of fact, why are those even two separate paragraphs? (Probably a woman editor.)

“Perhaps, when we’re in the air,” the man said, knowingly, “I could buy you a little drink?” His small, close-together eyes were riveted on the twisted zipper of Garp’s straining turquoise jump suit.

Irving finally transcending the 70s by stealing commentary from 1959's Some Like it Hot.

The best rape story I have ever read, wrote Ellen James.

Again, the stupidity of the line is pretty funny out-of-context but really awful in-context.

“And what do you want to be?” he asked her, barely keeping himself from adding: When you grow up. She pointed to him and blushed. She actually touched his gross breasts. “A writer?” Garp guessed. She relaxed and smiled; he understood her so easily, her face seemed to say.

Make it stop… no… no more writer characters.

Garp noticed that the gnarled thumb and index finger of her writing hand were easily twice the size of the unused instruments on her other hand; she had a writing muscle such as he’d never seen.

That's more horrific than all the other body horror in the book, and this one doesn't seem intentional!

18. Habits of the Under Toad

There were the expectable personal letters to Ellen James: condolences from idiots, propositions from sick men—the ugly, antifeminist tyrants and baiters of women who, as Garp had warned Ellen, would see themselves as being on her side.

The unnecessary inclusion of "ugly" takes this line from annoying to funny.

19. Life After Garp

“Life,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead, an ending occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that’s left is memory. But even a nihilist has a memory.”

Irving, you would have liked Houellebecq if only he had been writing back then. (Though come to think of it, both of you are unfortunately still alive.)

The flag was at half-mast for the former tight end Robert Muldoon. The scoreboard flashed 90! 90! 90! Duncan noted how the times had changed; for example, there were feminist funerals everywhere now; he had just read about a big one in Nebraska. And in Philadelphia the sports announcer managed to say, without snickering, that the flag flew at half-mast for Roberta Muldoon. “She was a fine athlete,” the announcer mumbled. “A great pair of hands.” “An extraordinary person,” agreed the co-announcer.

And the football crowd's booings went wild.

“There’s no sex like transsex!”

Final Thoughts

This was a largely negative roundup, but I wouldn't say Garp is a bad book per se. The prose is good and even funny in parts, but probably not as many parts nowadays as the author intended. It suffers more than other books as a product of its time in a couple big ways:

First, the writings-within-writings and writer characters and meta writing commentary all get very tiring. Whether or not that authorial style was ever good, I don't think it comes across as good now. (Maybe unless you're a writer?)

Second, the book is deeply tied to the specific politics of the 70s: 2nd-wave feminism and Taxi Driver aesthetics. And while that isn't a failing of the book — it's okay for books to be of their time — it does mean there's little insight left for the modern reader. Going back to Irving's 40th Anniversary Edition intro, he writes:

Garp is a political novel, and the politics of sexual intolerance and suppression haven’t gone away.

Which is true, but he also writes:

In 1976–77, when I was living in Massachusetts and Vermont, where I finished Garp, it was inconceivable to me that the sexual violence I was writing about would long endure. In short, I thought sexual discrimination was too backward and too stupid to last.

Which makes him sound like an idiot, since he either thinks nothing has changed since 1978, or he was expecting we'd have achieved perfect change by now. (Or alternatively, the new intro was just a quick cash grab, which is more respectable.)

In any case, I'd ultimately say that if you're looking for rapey political commentary from the 70s, stick with more tactful works like Zardoz.