★★★★☆ What is Owen Meany?

A Prayer for Owen Meany

John Irving

What is Owen Meany?

John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany is a very good novel -- the best, in my opinion, of his novels that I have read -- and also a profoundly weird story. Those statements are not unrelated, since I *LOVE* stories that weird me out.

*SPOILERS BEGIN*

The big question about Owen Meany is "What is he?" Is he the Nth coming of the Lord Jesus Christ? (I say the Nth rather than the second, because if you believe that Owen was a reincarnation of Christ who somehow failed to be recognized as such by most of humanity, then there is no reason to think he is the only one. Perhaps God has been using this trick to intervene in human affairs for 2000 years.) Owen and his mother claim that she was a virgin when she gave birth to him. And Owen has strange abilities. The most difficult of these to explain without invoking the supernatural is foreknowledge -- you may call it prophecy if you like -- he knows of certain things that are going to happen well before they happen, and before there is any plausible basis for predicting them.

Our first-person narrator John Wheelwright is basically a normal kid. His first sentence, which Irving is his Introduction identifies as "My Favorite First Sentence", is

‘I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.’

So you see the question of religion is raised at the very start, and Owen's connection to it is immediately pointed out. I suspect that we are meant to think of John Wheelwright as a possible incarnation of of John the Baptist in the same way that Owen is, perhaps, an incarnation of Jesus.

Although John clearly believes in Owen's divine provenance, Irving never quite commits to it. You can read the entire novel without ever feeling certain that Irving is telling you that Owen is indeed an incarnate God.

It is this ambiguity that makes the novel work, and also that gives it its profoundly weird feel.

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