SOURCE: Malone, Michael. “Everything that Rises.” Nation 226, no. 22 (10 June 1978): 705-08.

In the following review, Malone asserts that Irving is successful in his blending of comedy and pain in The World according to Garp, praising Irving's treatment of gender roles, family, and the function of the imagination in fiction writing.

In America everything merges. And so, possibly by the same secret corporate current that consistently (and, they claim, coincidentally) elects identical covers for Time and Newsweek, everyone reviews the same books. On a trail of blurbs, reviewers race together like lemmings into a sea of print. Happily, this month's flurry of garlands is falling upon two talented young authors, Barry Hanna and John Irving, for two very impressive books, Airships (Hanna's third publication) and The World According to Garp, (Irving's fourth). Praise for Airships or Garp—or for both together, as in the recent front-page New York Times Book...