Boston, 1942. Nurse Jenny Fields, the 22-year-old, head-strong daughter of a textiles tycoon, decides that she wants to be a mother—without the complicating attachments of marriage and husband. No easy matter in those pre-Women's Lib days, with all the young men away fighting in Europe, not to say anything about conventional attitudes toward pregnancy and child-rearing. But Jenn finds her man (Technical Sergeant Garp, lobotomized by the war), who impregnates her just before his fatal regression back to the fetal stage. “She never did it with him again,” the child, named T. S. Garp, writes much later. “There was no reason. She didn't enjoy it.” Her mission was already accomplished.

So begins John Irving's fourth novel, The World According to Garp, certainly one of the most original (and readable) novels of the last few years. I can't, in fact, think of any novel published in the last year (with the exception of Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon) that has given me so many hours of sheer reading pleasure as Irving's imaginative work. I suspect that thousands of readers are going to react similarly during the months ahead, as they, too, discover the delights of Garp's wonderful, though often frightening, world.

That world—chronicled from the time of his conception till his death at 33—begins to take shape for Garp when his mother accepts a position as the head nurse at a private boy's school named Steerling. It is there that Garp, once he reaches his teens, decides to become a writer. But Jenny one-ups her talented son by writing her own book first—an autobiography which she titles A Sexual Suspect. (“I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone,” she wrote. “That made me a sexual suspect. … Then I wanted a baby, but I didn't want to have to share my body or my life to have one. … That made me a sexual suspect, too.”) When it is published, the book makes Jenny Fields an immediate cult figure for the nascent feminist movement, and Garp himself even more a shadow of his mother than before.

About the time the reader suspects that Irving has boxed himself into a corner (Jenny's fame, Garp's anonymity), the narrative bursts open with a series of rapid explosions: Garp's marriage to Helen Holms, followed by the birth of his own two children and the publication of his first novel, Procrastination. When Helen (fresh with a Ph.D. in English) begins teaching at the university, supporting Garp now in his role of house-husband and little-known writer, the narrative shifts again to a scene which is certainly one of the most hilarious descriptions of wife-swapping in recent fiction.

The reader eventually discovers that Irving is playing games with him: Garp publishes a second novel. The Second Wind of the Cuckold (a portion of it, like the earlier one, included in the text), and Helen takes on a second lover. Increasingly, for Garp (and the reader) it becomes almost impossible to separate the writer from his fictions, the mirror from its reflection. When Helen's affair crashes to a horrible ending—in a series of events that frame as chilling and as brutal an example of moral rectitude as I can remember—Garp enters into a period of malaise cum writer's block. Then Irving shifts his narrative, moving again from his story to the novel within the novel, there by opening up an entire new world of fictive characters and moral implications.

Thus Garp writes still another novel, The World According to Bensenhaver—a violently perverse story that offends even the taste of his faithful editor, yet a disturbingly accurate mirror image of the experience that Garp and his family have just lived through. The dust jacket of Garp's new novel describes the work as the story of “a man who is so fearful of bad things happening to his loved ones that he creates an atmosphere of such tension that bad things are almost certain to occur And they do.” As with Garp's earlier writing, a portion of the “novel” is included in Irving's text. Soon the reader begins to wonder which is a more accurate picture of reality: Garp's life (told by John Irving) or Garp's fiction.

Once again, the violence of Garp's fiction explodes into his own life: At a feminist rally where she is giving a speech, Jenny is shot by an irate husband who believes his wife has been led astray by the famous woman's autobiography Real life. Irving hints, is much more bizarre than anything Garp will ever be able to imagine in his writing And just to prove that point. Irving has his protagonist attend his mother's funeral (“the first feminist funeral”—no men permitted), dressed in drag and escorted by one of Jenny's faithful followers—Roberta Muldoon, a transsexual, “formerly Robert Muldoon. No. 90 of the Philadelphia Eagles,” Garp's disguise is, of course, discovered. Yet his eyes are opened further, not so much by the mob of Jenny's man-hating mourners, as by the male who subsequently tries to proposition him.

Irving's novel, then, is not so much a novel as a novel within a novel within a novel. The story itself is a brilliant panoply of current attitudes toward sex, marriage and parenthood, the feminist movement, and—above all—the concept of delineated sexual roles. Fortunately, Irving's treatment of these subjects is comic, ironic, at times even absurd. Roberta Muldoon comments after her sex change. “Oh, I never knew what s___ men were until I became a woman.”) Yet Irving is above all a moralist, espousing both responsibility (the novel's “message” and craftsmanship (the novel's form). In time, Garp (the character) learns that everything he does in life comes back to haunt him—even the smallest act, seemingly insignificant and long forgotten. As a writer, Garp learns a similar truth about his work: He is responsible for what he writes, for the characters he creates. Writing, Garp tells a friend, is “like trying to make the dead come alive. … No, no that's not right—it's more like trying to keep everyone alive forever. Even the ones who must die in the end. They're the most important to keep alive.”

An impossible task, yet The World According to Garp comes as close to that accomplishment as possible. John Irving has written a great novel; his characters will stay alive for years to come.