The World According to Garp | Characters

The creation of memorable, even eccentric or bizarre characters is one of Irving's major contributions to contemporary literature. Never quite stereotypes, his major characters are nevertheless somehow larger than life. Like his contemporary Anne Tyler, Irving makes characters with odd behavior or obsessions curiously believable and quite sympathetic. Jenny Fields, Garp's mother, is in many ways the perfect example of the stereotypically kind, quiet nurse, yet she defies the rules of society by becoming impregnated by a dying man whose only utterance is the sound "garp" (hence her son's...

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