How To Write A Great Novel starring A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
SHORT BOOK REVIEW (first)
I liked A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I finished reading it, and I would have read more if it had been a longer book. I might read another John Irving novel because of this book, but I’ll probably wait a while.
HOW TO WRITE A GREAT NOVEL
After reading the first few pages of A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, I was pretty sure that I’d never have the patience to finish it. There were too many characters and too many details of each character for me to keep track of. Already. In the first few pages. And there were still 600 more pages to go.
“How did you keep up with all of that crap?” I asked my older brother, who had recommended A Prayer for Owen Meany to me.
“I didn’t,” he admitted. “I just rolled with it.”
So that’s what I did. I just read all the crazy details, enjoyed the crazy details, and hoped in the back of my mind that I’d remember the important stuff. It wasn’t an issue.
I think A Prayer for Owen Meany is a great book, but sometimes defining what a great novel is can be tough because people can see it as subjective. I’ll try to use some objective standards to explain why a book is great and then apply these standards to A Prayer for Owen Meany. I don’t think a book needs to have all of the following characteristics, but a great book should have most of them. I’m not even sure what ‘most’ would be. Maybe I’m woefully unprepared to be writing about this topic.
GREAT OPENING SENTENCE (not exactly an objective standard)
A Prayer for Owen Meany has a great opening sentence. Maybe the sentence is a little too long, and it does have a semicolon in it (I don’t mind semicolons, but some critics think they’re pretentious. I think the anti-semicolon critics are pretentious. If a semicolon exists, why shouldn’t writers use it?), but it was interesting enough to inspire me to read through the first few pages, which were filled with details that I (temporarily) wasn’t interested in.
LITERARY GIMMICK
Most great novels have some kind of literary gimmick that make the books stand out, but authors have to be careful when using such a devices. Too many authors try a gimmick that ends up distracting too many readers, or these devices can make it seem like the author is trying too hard to be clever or to show off.
The most noticeable literary gimmick in A Prayer for Owen Meany is the use of all-caps whenever the title character Owen Meany speaks. There’s a really good reason for the author to use the ALL-CAPS, though, so it works, and it’s not annoying. At least, I wasn’t annoyed or distracted by it. I can only speak for myself on this.
Maybe the all caps wasn’t meant to be a gimmick. The best literary gimmick is one where the author has plausible deniability. If author John Irving had said that the ALL-CAPS wasn’t a gimmick, I’d verbally take his word for it and mentally say, “Well played, sir.”
LITERARY REFERENCES
Great novels often make references to other great classics to connect themes or to provide literary insight to human nature. If you like literary references (and I do, especially to novels that I’ve never read or even heard of), then you’d probably like A Prayer for Owen Meany.
If anything, there might be too many literary references, so many that the narrator (or the author) could be accused of showing off. If the narrator is showing off (that’s the way I chose to interpret it), he had a decent reason for it, not that I condone showing off. I just don’t mind it as much when it’s done by a fictional character rather than when it’s done by the author.
RELIGIOUS REFERENCES
A Prayer for Owen Meany isn’t a religious book. It’s more about faith, and I’ll leave it at that. While delving into faith and its many levels, the topic of religion comes up, and of course there are a lot of references to scripture and The Holy Bible, and some of it might offend members of certain denominations, but I’m a member of one of those denominations, and this novel doesn’t offend me at all. Instead, I thought, ‘Yeah, that sounds about right.’
The conflicts regarding faith in A Prayer for Owen Meany are probably common (I hope they’re common) among many people who have faith, but I can’t speak for them, only for myself. Still, I enjoyed the spiritual conflicts and religious references in A Prayer for Owen Meany.
UNIVERSAL RELEVANCE
A great novel should be relevant, no matter when it was written and no matter when it is being read. A Prayer for Owen Meany was published in 1989 and takes place throughout the 1950s and 1960s with glimpses of the 1970s and 1980s as well. Even so, A Prayer for Owen Meany holds up (not all literary fiction does, but that’s for another blog post). The conflicts still are relevant. The events that the characters reference are relevant to stuff going on today, and the characters’ reactions to those events mirror how people react to similar events today.
INSIGHTS ABOUT HUMAN NATURE
I think this one is tied closely to relevance. Insights about human nature go a long way to making a novel relevant. Fashion and language and certain tastes can be temporary, but human nature itself is ‘eternal (‘eternal’ may be too strong a word; ‘universal’ might be better). An old great novel might read like it’s old, but if it provides great insight into human nature in ways that most other novels don’t, then the book will be more relevant than stuff being published today.
I don’t want to get into specific insights in A Prayer for Owen Meany because I try to avoid discussing specific details about books. I like reading novels without knowing too much about them ahead of time, and I don’t want to ruin that potential experience for. anybody else.
MEMORABLE CHARACTERS
To start off, the title character Owen Meany is memorable, even without the ALL-CAPS. Yeah, the ALL-CAPS help, and, yeah, the ALL-CAPS is a literary gimmick, but, like I said earlier, it’s a good one, but either way, Owen Meany is memorable. A lot of the secondary characters are memorable too, but I won’t list them because you can get stuff like that in any other book review. The narrator can come across as a little dry at first, but that changes as the novel progresses, and even though I rolled my eyes at a few things that he did or said, his words and behavior made sense considering his circumstances and showed more personality and made him more dynamic, if a bit unpleasant sometimes.
That’s okay. I can relate.
WRITTEN BY A GREAT WRITER
This one might be the most difficult. John Irving is a great writer. Even when I had the occasional difficulty following a sentence, I never doubted his skill or talents. A writer with less talent can include all the other characteristics listed above, and the novel could still be pretentious crap.
Even though I think that I have a pretty good understanding of what goes into a great novel, I admit that I can’t write something like A Prayer for Owen Meany. I think that I did a decent job with The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy a few years ago. I did my best to include all the objective elements that go into a great novel, and I hope that none of the elements were too blatant for the reader to notice, especially the literary gimmick.
BUT I’M NOT COMPARING MYSELF TO JOHN IRVING. I CAN MENTION MY ONE NOVEL IN MY BLOG POST ABOUT ONE OF JOHN IRVING’S NOVELS BECAUSE IT’S MY BLOG, SO DON’T ACCUSE ME OF COMPARING MYSELF TO JOHN IRVING.
Ahem, pardon me. I was just channelling my inner Owen Meany. Like I said, it’s a great literary gimmick.
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It’s the oldest story in the world, 1990s style!
Man meets woman; man falls in “luuuvvv” with woman; man gets blindsided by reality!
The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy is now available on Amazon
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But enough about me and my opinions! What do you think? Have you read A Prayer for Owen Meany? If not, what novels have pleasantly surprised you. What other characteristics do you think most great novels have? Share your literary wisdom by leaving a comment below!
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For more, see…
How To Write an Award-Winning Novel starring… Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
How to Write an Award-Winning Novel starring… The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Literary Gimmicks in Famous Novels: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
