John Irving recalling Gatsby
in A Prayer for Owen Meany
I read Owen Meany last February, and it still lives within me. I haven’t read The Great Gatsby in a long while, but the green light still lives in my heart, or perhaps my brain.
These Gatsbyesque quotes are from Irving’s novel A Prayer From Owen Meany. And yes, John, the protagonist, directly mentions Gatsby in a way that makes me want to re-read it sooner rather than later:
“I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar—you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.”
“…sometimes my date and I would sit on the dock, withholding any comment on the spectacle of the hard and distant stars.”
“the bare, bone-colored birches stood out in black-and-white against the snow, like charcoal drawings of themselves, or skeletons of the alumni.”
“Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.”
“Gatsby’s notion that he can ‘repeat the past’…”
“the frequency of how often Gatsby appears in moonlight (once, at the end of Chapter Seven, ‘watching over nothing’).” (like a star, perhaps, bright and cold and useless? see the quote above?)
“a truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy.”
“She possessed the nonspecific clumsiness of someone who makes such a constant effort to be inconspicuous that she is creatively awkward—without meaning to, Germaine hoarded attention to herself; her almost electric nervousness disturbed the atmosphere surrounding her.”
“The townspeople enjoyed them in the manner that only people from small towns—who know how everyone’s apron is tied, and by whom—can enjoy tedious eccentrics.”
“society’s commonplace blend of the murderous and the trivial.”
You must read A Prayer for Owen Meany, about John’s experience of Owen, a most peculiar child then man, and of a most peculiar loss. And you must read The Great Gatsby, if you have not yet. Don’t be put off because it’s required reading in high school. Read it freely for yourself, with no tick-off of pages or themed papers to write. Read it thinking about the people you see on reality tv today, about style over substance, about living too hard to just stop and look around and be and know yourself.
“My life is a reading list.”—John Wheelwright, A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
A Prayer For Owen Meany at Bookshop.org
The Great Gatsby: The Only Authorized Edition at Bookshop.org
Both links give a little help to independent bookstores and to my podcast. Thank you!
read after reading the novel: spoilers are here: Mental Floss: 13 Facts About A Prayer For Owen Meany
