![]() ![]() I feel pretty good about most of what’s going on in this diagram, but there are some questions that I don’t have answered. ![]() The first sentence of A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY As I sit here, remembering how this plays out, I desperately want to reread it again. Talk about a spoiler alert, huh? Little Owen’s gonna kill the narrator’s Momma and somehow be redeemed by the person who loved her most. “I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.” ![]() Irving’s Americana prose is jaunty: his tone is simultaneously critical, naieve, and compassionate.Ī Prayer for Owen Meany was the first Irving novel that I read. ![]() They are broad and sweeping portraits of American families and American dysfunction, but not in the gothic or studiously sincere ways of writers such as Steinbeck or Faulkner. Reading his novels makes me feel like a real adult. Who then is my arch nemesis? Dementia? Alzheimers? Apologies. It is perhaps my only super power: the ability to recite the first sentence of this great American novel without any great effort. I do remember rereading the opening passage after finishing the book, and it was at that point that I was able to recite from memory the first line. I have no recollection of trying to memorize the sentence. ![]()
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