[In the following review, Grumbach argues that Irving subtly and persuasively treats themes concerning the absurdity of modern life in The World according to Garp, describing it as an “imaginative feast.”]

Before I attempt the almost impossible task of describing a complex and fascinating new novel, I want to place The World According to Garp, by John Irving, alongside Going after Cacciato, by Tim O'Brien. They are 1978's most original—and therefore best—novels thus far.

Garp itself is a paradox: both slick and subtle, trifling and profound. (My theory is that the novel was written backward from the final sentence, which is: “But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”) It is a rich and blackly humorous miscellany, one that I predict will sell well because it reads quickly and easily and tells startling, even shocking stories about the absurdity of modern existence. At the same time, it will interest and please demanding critics with its satire on current cultural trends: the feminist movement, educational theories, parental obsession with children, and more.

It is hard to say what Garp is about because any summary of what happens in the novel's picaresque pages would make it seem as absurd as soap opera, which it is not. The story centers on T. S. Garp—son to the early and accidental heroine of the women's movement, Jennie Fields; husband of Helen; father of two sons and a daughter. It is about his curious life at a private school for boys, where his mother is a nurse; in Europe, where he goes to write; and in New England, where Helen studies and then teaches. The novel contains the stories Garp writes and large chunks of the novel he publishes. Unlike John Gardner's use of a Gothic novel within his October Light, wherein the connection between the two is clever rather than symbiotic, John Irving's inclusions are the sinews of the book. They make emphatic the events of Garp's own life.

More than a life of Garp, Irving's novel is Garp's gospel, his vision of the world, his fears, his bloody and apostolic adventures, which could happen only in a cruel and senseless world.

The life of Garp's mother might have constituted a gospel of its own. Nurse Jennie Fields conceives Garp almost immaculately: She uses the semen of a mangled and dying soldier to serve her need of a child and to accommodate her hatred of men and her crusade against lust in the world. It is through Garp's world view that we see Jennie and all her followers, including Roberta, a transsexual who once played professional football, and the members of the Ellen James Society, women who have cut out their tongues to show their sympathy for a young rape victim whose tongue was cut out to keep her from identifying her attacker.

The recurrent image in Garp is amputation—of a penis, an arm, a thumb. The events of life according to Garp are all violent (just as in Harry Crews's novels the violence of life is represented by freakish characters). This violence belongs to the natural history of persons who are terminal cases—to all of us, that is, who inhabit the present world. If the events seem at times to be too brutal and terrible, if too many violences seem to have been heaped upon already suffering and bloodied persons, that is the way it is: “Garp was an excessive man. He made everything baroque, he believed in exaggeration; his fiction was extremist.” Garp writes and lives as he finds the world. And because John Irving is so subtle and persuasive a writer, we believe in his fictional world.

To Garp, the world seems full of dangers that flood in on children and swamp the emotional life of parents. Garp's one wish is to make the world safe, especially for his beloved sons, Walt and Duncan. But no one in Garp's world is safe or whole for long: Walt dies in a satyric scene, and every one of Garp's terminal cases, including himself, will die. Every death will be carefully, almost lovingly, delineated, with each life rounded off from birth to death in the manner of the nineteenth-century novelists—not because Irving is emulating Thackeray or Dickens but because that is the proper clinical approach to medical case histories, or biblical stories, or the pointless life and death of modern man.

A few words about John Irving's style. In this new volume (he has written three other novels, but none of them can be mentioned in the same breath with Garp), he has developed a plain, almost bloodless prose, so matter-of-fact that it disarms the reader. It has a deceptively antiseptic quality that misleads us into expecting the ordinary. When Irving's (and Garp's) imagination explodes at every turn, we have already been lulled into unpreparedness by the words. For this reason, I was not offended by the extent of the novel, nor did I grow tired (as a friend told me she had) of the epic length. If it is true that Garp (and Irving) “was a serious writer whose ‘tendencies toward baroque exaggeration have run amuck,’” as one reviewer of Garp's writing says, I was not put off by the excess. My sensibilities were soothed by the almost pacific narrative manner. Reading Garp was like listening to Homer's account of the Trojan War told in a singsong monotone. I relished every page, every line, of this imaginative feast. To paraphrase Alexander Pope, it has all the force of many fine words.