Book Studies: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, John Irving

Published, 1976, 570 pages

Didactic Journal/ Lesson Plans: 189 pages, 80,817 words, visuals

TWENTY YEARS AGO, which was twenty years after The World According to Garp was published, I wrote an Afterword to the novel. Rewriting is the unglamorous part of creating, but revision is essential for clarity. In rewriting this new Introduction to Garp, of course I found things to cut or change in that 1998 Afterword, and I found a lot of necessary things to add. In retrospect, it’s unnecessary to say that Garp is a worst-case scenario or that I am a doomsayer novelist, but in 1972–75—when I was teaching at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, where I began writing Garp—I was worried that the subject of sexual hatred (of intolerance of sexual minorities, and sexual differences) would be outdated before I finished the novel. In 1976–77, when I was living in Massachusetts and Vermont, where I finished Garp, it was inconceivable to me that the sexual violence I was writing about would long endure. In short, I thought sexual discrimination was too backward and too stupid to last. 

In 1978, when Garp was published, I thought I’d written a period piece. Garp is an angry and a comic novel—a feminist novel and an ode to the women’s movement, which is at once exalted and satirized—but, above all (I thought), Garp is a period piece. I was wrong. The World According to Garp isn’t prescient, but sexual hatred hasn’t gone away. It’s not good news that Garp is still relevant. We should be ashamed that sexual intolerance is still tolerated, but it is. (x)