"The World According to Garp" shows that John Irving is haunted by the high level of quotidian American violence and the vulnerability of American lives. He can't get the frequency of assassination as a method of settling our domestic political and social quarrels out of his mind; and he is tormentedly aware of something like a war on women going on in our society as women's struggle for real equality continues and intensifies. He has not, however, arrived at wisdom on any of these matters. Apart from Andrew Greeley and some other heavy-breathing pundits, who has? (p. 1)
Through its formal convolutions and sinuosities this novel is … a sort of treatise on how reality is processed by fiction; it takes a sophisticated view of the relations in art between the imaginary and the actual. For example, Garp writes as his fourth book "The World According to Bensenhaver." It has a lurid plot entailing rape, manslaughter and other violence, and represents Garp's idiosyncratic attempt to deal with the trauma of a terrible, ridiculous accident…. The Bensenhaver narrative, an entire chapter of which is included, is obviously a parody of the work containing it. So we are left to ponder the following question: What traumas suffered by John Irving elicited "The World According to Garp," as Garp's traumas elicited "The World According to Bensenhaver"? The fact that such questions are not really answerable, except in imagination, does not make them less interesting and important.
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