It must have been with a pretty desperate laugh that Irving thought up the plot for his richly nasty book [The World According to Garp]. Jenny Fields, a frigid American nurse, desires a child but no involvement with a man. She chooses Sergeant Garp, a ball-turret gunner shot down over France, capable only of muttering his name and squirting his aimless seed. His last shot is Nurse Fields's first—and last, too. 'She … felt Garp shoot up inside her generously as a hose in summer.' Thus she is impregnated; he dies.

Having accepted such a beginning—which is, indeed, highly acceptable in comparison with much richer parts of the book later on—one gets a brief spring of enjoyment. In the young Garp's childhood, as he is brought up by the resilient Jenny, who works as a nurse in a boys' school, there are some rewarding moments...