#43 - A Prayer for Owen Meany

One of Amy's earliest additions to my list, I got to read Owen Meany at the end of my first year in Toronto. I'm glad it came when it did in my life, because Irving's Canada - cold and dry, grey and white, but well lit and secure - completed what is a distinctly North American setting. This novel has one of the most clear-eyed narratives that I've ever read - every line of it contained a healthy dose of truthfulness. Oddly enough, it took me a few hundred pages before I realized I hadn't remembered his name - and I was doubly shocked once I realized he  It also captured such real abstract moments - different living situations growing up, the difference between high school and university - alongside hard factual critiques of politics - though he self-deprecates most of his comments afterwards.

Seeing cultural touchpoints discussed from a recent viewpoint was very exciting - seeing Marilyn Monroe's timeless appeal, Kennedy's changing (percieved) morality and Nixon and Reagan's steady (percieved) villainy. Ronald Reagan is a vapid young drunk - remember that? The humour was sharp, but the themes were spectacular. I've never seen what I suppose I must admit is my own religious background, meticulously profiled and rebuked, but it delivered. Amy's synchronicity was always present, and personally, I was thrilled with his sense of time - day/night, holidays and seasons, and building the dates and years together into their own historical record.

The part of A Prayer for Owen Meany that hit me the hardest was Harriet Wainwright and her belief in the power of reading. She believed that it was something you worked on, that was true exercise. TV (and as John admits, newspapers and magazines) do not satisfy the endurance requirements. This book, not through age but through determination, was a pchallenge of stamina - 90 page chapters, sturdy clauses and introspective paragraphs. For the last 5 years I've been working through classic literature, but I've got a long way to go when it comes to reading. Not long, so much as eternity.

That's why in the interest of new challenges, I'm going to trim down my remaining Literature list in order to try and pull together some other lists:

Non-Fiction - Learning about the world around us.
Philosophy - Learning about the world inside us.
Modern* Fiction - Learning about what brought us to today.
Current** Fiction - Learning about where things are going.

Almost forgot - Amy picked another perfect winner:

10/10

* Post-1900

** Post-2000