One of the first adult books I read when I was younger. I don’t mean adult in terms of audience exactly, but adult in terms of you more or less need to be an adult to appreciate a lot of what this contains. In part, this is a book about the Baby Boomer generation told from within, and that the memories and experiences tied to that generation fuel a lot of the book. It’s also helpful to have some world experience and world weariness. So many of the adult books I read as a kid fed into a general precociousness. But reading Stephen King in 6th grade was fueled by the gore and thriller-stuff and reading Vonnegut as a teen fed into playing around with cynicism. So here, the adultness here is about world weariness, a feeling you can get as a teen, but is more rare. It also helps to not be a teen with the mysteries and allure of sex predominating so much of my attention to where the idea of someone being in their mid-40s and not being interested in sex (our protagonist reads through today’s udnerstand as asexual) and not have it be devastating feeling that someone who COULD be having sex, just isn’t.
The book is about John Wheelright, who is looking back at his youth and adolescence from his perch as an English teacher in the late 1980s in Toronto. He’s American by birth, but went to Canada during the height of the Vietnam War. He tells us first that he first started beliving in God because of his childhood friend Owen Meany. Like a lot of the information in this book, the details are witheld until he’s ready to tell us. By the end, we have almost everything we could know about the story except the story itself. This is a book about a death foretold, but that story keeps us in the dark until the very end.
We meet Owen Meany on a baseball field. He’s a small 11 year old who is batting. Normally, he’d be told to take a walk, but this time he’s told to swing away. He does, and his subsequent fall ball strikes John’s mother on the head, killing her. From here, we flow to the past, present, and future as we learn other small parts about Owen and John’s lives together. It’s a rich and rewarding story, and like with a lot of good novels, there’s several layers of complexity operating throughout. You can decide whether a book about religious miracles counts as magical realism or not, but that’s part of the interest.
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4473.A_Prayer_for_Owen_Meany)