A Prayer for Owen Meany

A Prayer for Owen Meany is John Irving's 1989 seventh novel, the work many Irving readers cite as their actual favorite and the canonical contemporary American maximalist literary novel about faith, fate, and the long arc of American mid-twentieth-century identity. The structural premise is John 'Johnny' Wheelwright, the now-adult narrator writing from his self-imposed exile in 1980s Toronto, telling the story of his lifelong best friend Owen Meany - a tiny boy with a piercing voice (rendered in unbroken capitalized dialogue throughout the novel) who from an early age believed he was God's instrument and was given specific dreams of the date and manner of his own future death. The novel runs across the 1950s and 1960s New Hampshire towns of Gravesend, the prep-school years at Gravesend Academy, the Vietnam-era draft confrontations of 1968, and the eventual fulfillment of Owen's foretold ending.

Irving's structural method is the patient maximalist construction across approximately six hundred pages with the Johnny present-tense Toronto narration alternating with the chronological Owen-and-Johnny childhood-and-young-adulthood arc. The novel reads in the patient first-person ensemble register Irving has been refining across the broader catalog (The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Widow for One Year). The Owen-as-Christ-figure structural conceit (Owen kills Johnny's mother in a Little League foul ball; Owen develops his own theological certainty; Owen's death is foretold from early in the novel) is the structural advantage that lifts the novel above the broader contemporary American maximalist literary fiction tradition. The Vietnam-era anti-draft chapters in the back third earn the structural moral payoff the entire novel has been building toward across the long-arc construction.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the structural Irving masterwork, and for fans of The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, and the broader contemporary American maximalist tradition. The 1998 Mark Steven Johnson Simon Birch film adaptation captures only the early portion of the novel and is loosely adapted. The Joe Barrett audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.