The most interesting book I've read in the last few months is John Irving's The World According to Garp…. Garp is both a family saga and the history of a marriage, and there's more than a little of Catch-22 at its heart; Irving's sense of humor is as wild and brutal as Joseph Heller's, and Garp's opening scenes, which involve the mating of an antisexual young nurse and a catatonic tail gunner, seem like an explicit wink at both Heller and his doomed Everyman, Snowden.

I've read Garp three times. I've liked it more with each reading, and I'm still damned if I know what to make of it. The book's strengths and weaknesses are matters of real complexity; when the space I need to deal with them becomes available, I'll try to explain why this novel is a literary Blood on the Tracks [see excerpts below...