Beginning with the decision of Jenny Fields (Garp's mother) to have a child without, as she puts it, locking her life and body to a man, the life of T. S. Garp unfolds through his years as son, husband, parent and writer (each is a primary theme), ending with his assassination at the age of 33. His mother, whose autobiography, A Sexual Suspect, makes her a hero among feminists, is also assassinated. Along the way many other people die, mostly in ways unlikely and bizarre, as if Garp's world were a slaughterhouse fitted up with funhouse mirrors, and his story a string of epilogues. Garp himself thinks of the novelist as “a doctor who sees only terminal cases,” and his own death is later described as a scene “only Garp could have written.”

With his wife and two small sons, Garp spends summers in a family house (later a feminist headquarters) on the New Hampshire coast. Because one of the boys, Walt, is very young, there is much warning about the undertow along this stretch of shore. The undertow, they remind him, is very wicked today; look out for the undertow. One morning they spot little Walt alone on the beach, staring intently into the moil of incoming waves. When asked what he's doing he says: “I'm trying to see the Under Toad.” All along he had mistaken the proper term and had mythicized the fear it signaled into a creature of invisible but monstrous being. But in another sense Walt is right; and through the latter part of Garp's life, “it” slithers closer and closer.

The World According to Garp is John Irving's fourth novel in 10 years. It is his best, his most original, and nothing in contemporary fiction matches it. Some combination of farce and debacle is standard in much of recent writing (also in film), but Irving's blend of gravity and play is unique, audacious, almost blasphemous. The story in itself is so strong in compassion and humanity that Irving's obstinate frolic with fate seems nearly perverse, as if—and this does seem the case—the progress of his art, novel by novel, were toward more intimate knowledge of, and possibly alliance with, the Under Toad. Irving's relish for German words, together with the way in which Vienna (“a museum housing a dead city”) haunts everything he has written, gives an almost historical tremor to the pun on Tod, while the corresponding pun on Unter suggests a depth of being which Paul Tillich has called “the demonic,” by which is meant life perversely pitted against itself, a will to mockery and mutilation, eruptions of exuberant spite.

These are the forces to which Irving has adjusted his vision, hence his insistence on bizarre events and sad outcomes—on stories “rich with lunacy and sorrow,” as one of Garp's friends says—and also his faith, endorsed by Garp, that laughter is a species of sympathy. Anything can be dangerous, an element of self-parody resides in even the most pitiful moments, and anyone with children can tell what the “imagination of disaster” means. The Under Toad, Irving knows, is everywhere at home; and the aim of his art is to fix the perception of life's demonic undertow at exactly those points where, any day, any one of us might slip and be sucked down.

Irving's first novel, Setting Free the Bears (1968), is a tale of calamity and fun as two young men “liberate” the Vienna zoo. In the middle comes a more desperate story of maniac behavior in Vienna during the Second World War. While the “zoo bust” is a romp, the war with its erratic rummage allows that rapid-fire deployment of superbly wild detail which marks Irving's early style at its best.

Irving's second book, The Water-Method Man (1972), takes its young protagonist through two wives and a side trip to Vienna on his precarious approach to adulthood. Irving's most relaxed piece of writing, the novel is also an ingenious performance in juxtapositions. Script and scenes from a cinema verité film replay the story in parody; and against these, like the backstop of night, Irving unwinds the blood-and guts saga of Akthelt and Gunnel, an epic poem in “Old Low Norse,” in which, as in cartoon-like dream, the Under Toad rules.

The 158-Pound Marriage (1974), Irving's third novel, is a black and ruthless book. Two couples decide to switch partners and their odd indulgences lead to such buffoonery and hatred that, having located life's perversity in the commonplace of adultery, Irving is free to push into the depths. No overt violence occurs, but things end badly, with a hint that one of the couples may have played this game before. Sex, in other words, is no longer an easy-going gift, as in the earlier novels. It has become a very complicated set of relationships, which in turn allows Irving a new penetration of character. And although the book takes most of its power from the tension between the two men, this is the first time that women in Irving's fiction start to move.

They certainly move in The World According to Garp, where rape, feminism (both wise and fanatical versions) and finally “sex reassignment” are central issues. One of the finest characters in the novel, before her sex-change through surgery, had been a pro-football star. Jenny Fields successfully resists her allotted “role,” and in Garp's family Helen, his wife, is the one who goes off to work. Garp cleans house, cooks, worries about the kids, their colds, their safety on the streets. And when Garp finds himself dressed in drag, he finds out, first hand, how women are looked upon by men.

But in Garp's world, no reassignment will save one from life's lunacy and sorrow. Irving's novel, like Garp's “Grillparzer” story, depicts everything as a “ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification.” At the same time, Irving tells the story of Garp's family with great tenderness and wisdom. By tracing the relationship between wife and husband, and then again between parents and children (and how these two sets intersect to cause catastrophe), Irving is able to handle a large range of human hope and fear and final insufficiency. He is excellent in his portrait of Garp's sons, Duncan and Walt, whose view of their father is often hilarious, whose dialogue is true without fail, and whose vulnerability in a world of numberless hurtful things causes Garp a brooding, prophetic dread.

And then it happens: mid-way through the novel an accident occurs, infinitely improbable but absolutely fated by the behavior that brings it about, leaving in its wake death, dismemberment, and a world that for Garp grows darker, wilder, more open to demonic intrusion. Garp's mother is shot at a political rally, and Garp himself will die for writing a sensational novel about rape, which makes him famous but also enrages a group of radical feminists, the “Ellen Jamesians,” whose sign is their amputated tongues.

Much of Garp, as I summarize, sounds melodramatic. Some of it is, but only by design. Irving can be very subtle indeed, but he also knows, and chooses to explore, the fact that life in its madder moments does tend toward melodrama. In Vienna, Garp watches his mother's murder on TV and thinks: “the event was an X-rated soap opera from start to finish.” The problem with melodrama is that while those of us at a distance may laugh, those nearby are infected, overwhelmed, swept off the deep end.

After enough collision with craziness and pain, living becomes a condition of aftermath, of education in disaster which leads us to value any small rite or norm or proven good through which sanity and common sense survive. Of cooking, for example, Garp says: “If you are careful, if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.”

One of the more extraordinary things about this book of bad luck is Irving's sense of thoughtful meditation, an effect enforced by the fact that everywhere in the novel we encounter quotations from Garp's writing, remarks spartan and exactly to the point, which become a sort of running commentary on the novel itself. A further consequence of this shared intelligence is loss of distance between Garp's voice and that of the narrator. In effect, the author of Garp is Garp, and just here, in the relation of the writer to his fictions, The World According to Garp grows disturbing.

Garp's novel about rape is called The World According to Bensenhaver, his novel before that was about “two married couples who have an affair,” and his first novel was about setting free the animals of the Vienna zoo. There are also, if we can trust information on book jackets, outstanding parallels between circumstances of Garp's life and those of John Irving's. And as a kind of ironic capstone, among all the fine things Garp has to say about the novelist's art, his favorite theme is that “the worst reason for anything being part of a novel is that it really happened.”

Fiction about itself is the thing T. S. Garp professes to hate most, and Irving is clearly playing, by way of parody, with this last gasp of modernism. But thereby he also toys with his own creation, and what makes this seem strange and upsetting is that he obviously cares—deeply and with much compassion—about the people in his novel. It is not impossible, in this book, to see implicit recognition of art's darker magic, some sense of the gnostic belief that even God lives in fear of His creations—as if Irving would have the terror of his vision put into the keeping of Garp, as the title suggests. The World According to Garp is brilliant, funny and consistently wise; it is a work of vast talent, but also exceedingly disquieting.