{"id":138994,"date":"2019-08-23T11:49:40","date_gmt":"2019-08-23T15:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=138994"},"modified":"2019-08-30T14:00:27","modified_gmt":"2019-08-30T18:00:27","slug":"garp-forty-years-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/08\/23\/garp-forty-years-later\/","title":{"rendered":"Garp, Forty Years Later"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

According to my Goodreads page, the first time I read The World According to Garp<\/em>, by John Irving, was after my first year of college. I had thought, mistakenly, that I\u2019d first read it in high school, but regardless, it had made an impression on me. It was my first exposure to an openly trans character and an openly asexual and aromantic character in fiction, the first book I read that explicitly discussed feminism and confronted toxic masculinity head on (though it didn\u2019t call it that and, in my first reading, I didn\u2019t, either). In rereading the novel recently, I wasn\u2019t surprised that these themes had struck me so deeply, though Garp <\/em>is about so much else as well.<\/p>\n

In his new foreword to the fortieth-anniversary edition of the book, Irving writes that back in 1977, he thought the novel was about \u201cthe polarization of the sexes \u2026 the story was about men and women growing further apart. Look at the plot: a remarkable, albeit outspoken woman (Garp\u2019s mother, Jenny Fields) is killed by a lunatic male who hates women; Garp himself is assassinated by a lunatic female who hates men.\u201d But when Irving asked his then-twelve-year-old son, Colin, to read Garp <\/em>in manuscript form, the boy saw the book completely differently. He told his father that it\u2019s \u201cabout the fear of death \u2026 Maybe, more accurately, the fear of the death of children\u2014or of anyone you love.\u201d With that reading, it makes sense that my memory tricked me into thinking I first read Garp<\/em> in high school: my father and his mother both died when I was sixteen, several months apart.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A brief summary, for those who don\u2019t have the book seared in their minds: the novel begins with a morally questionable nurse, Jenny Fields, who doesn\u2019t want a husband or boyfriend or to have sex with anyone at all, but does want a child. She impregnates herself by raping a dying soldier (he is severely brain-damaged and cannot consent). She raises her son, T.\u2009S. Garp, in the infirmary annex of a large and fancy private school for boys. Garp grows up to become a writer, though he is always in Jenny\u2019s shadow: she writes a best-selling autobiography called A Sexual<\/em> Suspect<\/em>, which makes her a feminist icon. Garp marries his childhood friend, Helen, after he proves to her that he can write a good story (theirs is first a marriage of the minds and only later one of love and lust). Garp stays home and cooks, cleans, and takes care of their children. Jenny Fields, meanwhile, retires from nursing and takes in women who need shelter at her large inherited home. Both she and Garp are befriended by a wonderful trans woman named Roberta Muldoon, who remains the family\u2019s staunch friend long after both Garp and Jenny are murdered. The World According to Garp <\/em>has many plotlines, including the struggle of becoming an artist (and the ambivalence many artists feel about whether it is a meaningful or worthy pursuit at all), the deconstruction of traditional gender roles within families, infidelity, sexual violence, and death.<\/p>\n

While I agree with Irving\u2019s son\u2014I see far more about death, parenthood, and its accompanying fears in the book now than I did when I\u2019d only just turned twenty\u2014in my emotional reading, The World According to Garp <\/em>is about gender and sexuality, and in these ways, it is still incredibly relevant. As I get older, I find myself interrogating my own sense of gender, unable to understand what it means to be a woman, though certainly I am no closer to being a man. I find myself leaning away from the binaries of the gender spectrum altogether and toward the liminal space in the middle. Though I was socialized as a woman\u2014like Jenny Fields and Helen were\u2014I haven\u2019t ever felt what it means to embody<\/em> womanness. That is, I see women around me, cis and trans alike, who seem to have a deep sense of and connection to that elusive feeling, and it escapes me. But while I puzzle out what that lack of knowing means, I can appreciate when literature resonates with me. Neither Jenny nor Helen plays into her socially expected gender, and both value and defend their independence.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t see Garp<\/em> as being about the \u201cpolarization of the sexes\u201d at all. It seems to me that it is, instead, about blurring of the lines between sexes and genders, and the acknowledgment that binaries (of all sorts) are rarely stable, fixed, or even desirable. Garp, for instance, sneers at psychiatrists, seeing them as \u201cdangerous simplifiers, those thieves of a person\u2019s complexity.\u201d As a mentally ill person who relies on psychiatrists, I tend to agree with Garp: the medical and pharmaceutical industries oversimplify humanity in order to turn a profit. Garp appreciates the complex, and the villains of the book are those who cling to oversimplified binaries: they have a self-righteous narrative of good (their beliefs) versus evil (the beliefs of others) that doesn\u2019t allow for any space in between. And even these villains are treated with empathy by the narrator, if not always by the characters themselves. Jenny Fields, I would argue, is killed not by a man who hates women but rather by a man who hates his wife for leaving him, and has decided to blame Jenny for it\u2014and he is gunned down by his own hunting buddies the minute he shoots Jenny. Garp is killed not by a woman who hates men so much as by a traumatized acquaintance who hates Garp for sleeping with her sister once, long ago and consensually. Does a culture of toxic masculinity play into both these assassinations? Absolutely\u2014but that is the reality within which the characters lived and in which we still exist, one in which patriarchal structures rule with a slowly loosening iron grip.<\/p>\n

And before either of these events occurs, there are a good four hundred pages or more of these characters living, loving, and trying to do their best in the world. In the seventies it wasn\u2019t often\u2014and let\u2019s be honest, it still isn\u2019t\u2014that a big popular novel featured asexuality, trans folks, or a stay-at-home dad who loved being there for his children.<\/p>\n

Roberta Muldoon looms large in my reading of the novel, not because of her tall frame (her history as a former football linebacker is mentioned often) but because she is three-dimensional, complex, and more maternal than any of the cis characters. She is also more thoughtful and aware of her gender. Jenny Fields tells Roberta that she \u201cis less sexually ambiguous than most people she knew,\u201d which makes sense to me as a person leaning towards the nonbinary\u2014I have found that gender, which can be as embodied as it is performative, gains significance when one has the need to deliberately consider it. Roberta was forced to think about her gender because she was assigned a different one at birth, whereas the cis characters in the novel have never needed to think particularly hard about what their gender means. Roberta\u2019s surety in her womanhood doesn\u2019t make her stereotypically feminine either\u2014she continues to be an athlete, running and playing squash with Garp; she also calls him often at two in the morning to cry about the latest man who\u2019s cast her aside as a novelty rather than a person.<\/p>\n

Roberta and her friendship with Garp\u2014he considers her his best friend\u2014exemplify something about the novel as a whole. Even cis, straight white men are capable<\/em> of being tolerant, of being empathic in their relationships as well as their art. Even they can learn. And maybe that\u2019s what the book is about more than anything else, more than gender and its messy expectations, more than violence and fear and death\u2014perhaps it is about the need for tolerance. Irving seems to think so: \u201cIt\u2019s not good news that Garp <\/em>is still relevant. We should be ashamed that sexual intolerance is still tolerated, but it is,\u201d he writes in his introduction.<\/p>\n

We should be ashamed, yes. But there is something like hope here for me, too\u2014because rather than being relegated to an oddball corner, Garp <\/em>is still being read, which means that Roberta Muldoon still lives, and Garp\u2019s cis son and the trans woman he married still live, and all that love and affection in the book\u2019s pages still live. Which means we can still learn from these characters, letting them reach through time and space to give us what we need from them now.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ilana Masad is an Israeli American book critic, fiction writer, and founder and host of\u00a0<\/em>The Other Stories, a podcast featuring new, struggling, and established fiction writers.\u00a0<\/em>She is currently a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska\u2013Lincoln, and her debut novel,\u00a0<\/em>All My Mother’s Lovers,\u00a0is forthcoming with Dutton in 2020.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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