A Tale of Two Best Friend’s Childhood As someone with a sister two years older than me, I knew about the daunting summer reading task mandatory for Honors English at North Providence High School. That daunting task is reading the 617 page book A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. Since my sister still had her copy of the book, I started reading before finals even ended way back in June, hoping to read about twenty pages a day to keep the torture in small doses. However, John Irving’s novel was far from torture. I tried to stick to my schedule of only twenty pages a day just so keep me occupied throughout the summer, but I failed miserably, and finished A Prayer For Owen Meany a week after finals. The book consists of motifs such as baseball, religion, friendship, war, inappropriate humor, school, and family which are highly relatable, regardless of gender or age. One incredible attribute to the story A Prayer For Owen Meany is how almost everything connects. As the reader I so easily overlooked “the shot” and wondered why Owen practiced it with John countless times. Clearly Owen would never be tall enough to play for the Gravesend Academy basketball team, and Owen was not even a fan of the sport basketball. However, at the very end of the book the importance of John and Owen’s shot is revealed. Irving writes, “’READY?’ he said; I passed him the Chicom grenade and opened my arms to catch him. He jumped so lightly into my hands; I lifted him up, as easily as I had always lifted him. After all: I had been practicing lifting up Owen Meany – forever” (Irving 612). Everything Owen did was for a reason, even something as stupid as being launched into the air. As a result of tremendous practice, Owen was able to save the Vietnamese children from the grenade. When I was a kid, my mother threw the Roman Catholic religion down my throat. I attended church almost every Sunday as well as religion classes for an hour every week, while I hated every second of it. I used the time spent in church to question the bible, and the more I questioned the more I realized religion was not for me. In a sense I am the reverse John Wheelwright, as he gained faith with age. One particular scene I found so interesting was in the first chapter, when John talks about Owen’s opinion of confession. Irving writes, “Owen said the pressure to confess- as a catholic- was so great he’d often made things up” (22). In this line Irving described every confession I was forced to go to for religion classes. I refused to believe a priest would not judge me for my deepest sins, so I confessed the most meaningless crimes of a child such as not listening to my parents or being rude to my sister. A Prayer For Owen Meany has so many different motifs that the 617 pages are highly relatable.
Being a teenage boy who only reads books when they are assigned in school, I need the book to have lots of action to keep my attention span focused. John Irving managed to keep my eyes on the story in a very clever way, using sexual humor. Since I only read for school, I have never read about someone’s sexual desires, penis size, or struggle with being a virgin. My favorite scene of the whole book is when Owen performs during the play and Mary Beth Baird kisses him. John narrates, “The baby Jesus had an erection; its protrusion was visible in spite of the tightly bound layers of his swaddling clothes” (Irving 214). When I first read this line I laughed for at least thirty minutes, and was interested in reading the rest of the chapter despite the fact I cannot stand Charles Dickins or A Christmas Carol. The words “The baby Jesus had erection” were posted in my group chat with all my friends who took AP English last year, and in the group chat with my friends who will be taking AP English this year. Of course none of the friends who are taking AP English this year had read as far in advance as I had at the time, so I got looked at like I was crazy, but the line still drew many laughs from immature teenagers. Overall, I loved reading John Irving’s, A Prayer for Owen Meany. I mostly admire the way Irving connected many of the scenes into the ending and stuck with the theme of Owen’s actions having tremendous importance. Once Owen was murdered, I truly realized that each tale or memory that Irving put in the novel was for a purpose, and these events would all tie together in end. The story of John and Owen’s friendship is highly relatable, and extremely well written. While I could do without the political rants and John’s life in Toronto, I am truly glad that I was assigned A Prayer For Owen Meany for summer reading, or else I never would have read John Irving’s novel about the power of friendship.