A Prayer for Owen Meany: A Novel

✍ Scribed by Irving, John

• Book ID: 106900001
• Publisher: Random House, Inc.
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780679642596

✦ Synopsis

Amazon.com Review

Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Highlights magazine used to put it, ''fun with a purpose.'' When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.

The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. --Tim Appelo

From Publishers Weekly

Although he is convincing in his appraisal of the tragedy of Vietnam and in his religious philosophizing, ''Irving's storytelling skills have gone seriously astray in this contrived, preachy, tedious tale of the eponymous Owen Meany, a latter-day prophet and Christ-like figure who dies a martyr after having inspired true Christian belief in the narrator Johnny Wheelwright,'' warned PW . Author tour.
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