Only a bold and innovative writer could venture so daringly backward into the literary past. Irving cares deeply for his characters and their stories and makes his readers care for them as well in doing so he places his work in the great lineage of the novel.
Irving's works in general, and Garp most spectacularly, signal the return of fiction to its proper and honorable concerns-a close engagement with the stuff of real life, a profound compassion for humanity, and-inextricably and possibly even causally connected to these qualities-great dedication to the narrative process, to storytelling itself. Because many professors seem to believe that literature was written exclusively to be studied in their courses and because far too many writers receive their training in those courses, a great deal of American writing has been marked by a sterile obsession with technique for its own sake, a conscious avoidance of traditional subjects, a fatal attraction to critical theory, and a perverse desire to appeal only to a coterie of initiates. Doctorow's Ragtime, indicated that after many years of stifling academicism, fiction may have finally graduated from college and ventured out into the arena of ordinary life.
The success of Garp, following the previous achievement of E.L. He achieved that rare combination of literary acclaim and wide readership that every writer dreams of. Initially a little-known academic novelist whose first three books- Setting Free the Bears, The Water-Method Man, and The 158-Pound Marriage-rapidly sought the remainder lists, he suddenly found himself inundated by critical superlatives and, no doubt, positively drenched in money. For John Irving himself, of course, the novel's reception must have been extremely gratifying: the book neatly divided his career forever into the pre-and post- Garp periods. The publication of The World According to Garp was an important event in contemporary American literature.
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