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A Prayer for Owen Meany (Modern Library) | 
 enlarge | Author: John Irving
Publisher: Modern Library
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $14.88
You Save: $10.07 (40%)
New (29) Used (19) Collectible (3) from $9.64
Avg. Customer Rating:  1067 reviews
Sales Rank: 65878
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 672
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.8 x 1.4
ISBN: 0679642595
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679642596
ASIN: 0679642595
Publication Date: June 4, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Few left in stock - order soon. Code: R20080716231550H
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Amazon.com
Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras. The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Guenter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. --Tim Appelo
Product Description
In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys—best friends—are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy’s mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn’t believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God’s instrument. What happens to Owen, after that 1953 foul ball, is extraordinary and terrifying.
A Prayer for Owen Meany was first published in 1989. This Modern Library edition includes a new Introduction by the author.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1062 more reviews...
 Terribly boring July 21, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This was the assigned book for my book club. I was so entirely bored and unengaged with the characters that I could not get more than a third of the way through the book. Painfully SLOW. I simply didn't care what happened to any of the characters.
 One of his best July 3, 2008
This was such a good book. I did not want it to end so I read it very slowly. The movie was awful, however.
My Favorite Modern Novel June 25, 2008
Owen Meany, small in size, but not in size, faith, intelligence, or especially, that one-of-a-kind VOICE.
I believe John Irving is the greatest raconteur of our times. He is not for those seeking a quick read to "ooh and aah" over at poolside. His writing is deep and rich. If you try to skip a paragraph, chances are you'll miss something you'll need later on. Chances are you're not the type of reader who will appreciate this perfect beauty, which only gets better as it goes on.
This book truly is absolute perfection in a novel. There's not much of that in the modern writing world. The first few chapters are slow going, but not to delay the miraculous end ... only to set the oh so important stage and plot. And oh, what a stage, what a cast of characters, what dialogue and New England settings.
Treat yourself to a true modern day masterpiece. By the end, you'll be sobbing, turning back pages saying, "Why? Why? This can't be," while knowing it HAD to be. I wish I could shake the hand that has written such an amazing tale.
All I can say is there are books you should check out from the library and there are those you have to own. Buy this one as it deserves a prominent place in your library.
 Hokey, sentimental, long-winded, and more absurd than profound June 23, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Am I reading correctly in the other reviews that this book is now a popular assignment for high-school students? I couldn't think of a better way to turn kids off literature for life. This book reads like a literary TV-movie, made for the Hallmark channel and dragged out to mini-series length. What do we get in the 600 pages? Writing that seems to be aspiring to Dickens but is really just drawn out with windy lightweight philosophizing, and pointless self-conscious digressions that seem like showy displays of (unremarkable) writing technique. All infused with an empty-headed "spirituality" that's apparently supposed to be profound or uplifting. Spare me, please. (I should have known from the dreadful opening line, which is reproduced on the Amazon page for the book.)
The supposedly moving story is filled with implausible details that make it seem almost in poor taste -- the title character is a boy who apparently suffers from dwarfism and is so small that the other Sunday-school children can lift him over their heads and pass him around the classroom without leaving their seats (yeah, sure), and a key plot point is when this tiny boy hits a baseball so hard it kills the narrator's mother. (That's not a spoiler -- it's revealed very early in the book.) If it weren't for the book's impossibly serious, heavy tone, I'd think some of it was an attempt at sick humor. Two stars instead of one because there are a few interesting scenes that offer brief relief from the book's predictable progression. And the narrator's likeable, wise stepfather is a well-developed character.
Edit: I posted my review when i was two-thirds through. Having finished the book, I'd strongly recommend that readers who are not enjoying it and are trudging through just to finish should just drop it. The final hundred pages, where the numerous dangling theads get tied up, are downright awful. The "meaning" revealed for so many of the endlessly repeated motifs is nothing more than flashy plotting, and it's laughable. You won't believe the ridiculous significance of the basketball shot. And the "nonpracticing homosexual" angle that comes up late is just bizarre, as if Irving were afraid of offending his reader with an actual gay character. This is probably the worst novel I've ever read (for comparison's sake, my desert-island list would include Moby Dick, Huck Finn, Gatsby, USA, Confederacy of Dunces, and The Name of the Rose). But it's too late to change my rating to one star. Really, if you're thinking about reading this, read Great Expectations. If you've already read that, you'll recognize this as a third-rate wanna-be.
Recommendations June 14, 2008
If you want a fairly comprehensive definition of "religion", I recommend these books and movies, and in any order:
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Donnie Darko, Director's Cut
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
All of these depict the concept of religion differently, except Donnie Darko and A Prayer for Owen Meany, which have similar definitions of religion. I threw Donnie Darko in there because it's a nice visual compliment to A Prayer for Owen Meany.
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