SOURCE: Bawer, Bruce. “The World according to Garp: Novel to Film.” Bennington Review 15 (summer 1983): 74-9.

In the following essay, Bawer compares the novel The World according to Garp to the film adaptation, asserting that the film maintains the major thematic elements of Irving's novel but presents them from a more optimistic perspective.

No film of recent years has received a smaller proportion of the attention and admiration that it deserves, whether from critics or the viewing public, than George Roy Hill's The World According to Garp. This amazing film, which is about nothing less than what it means to be human, had the misfortune to be released in a year when everyone in America seems to have forgotten what it means to be human. Time named the Computer the “Man of the Year”; the movie public fell in love not with Garp, but with E. T. That humans...