Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll

Postscript: The Backlash According to Irving

Postscript: The Backlash According to Irving There is no more conspicuous evidence of postsixties confusion than the enormous success, both critical and popular (over 2,500,000 paperback copies in print), of The World According to Garp. Though Garp has its virtues as a novel, I think it owes its status as a phenomenon to its point of view: John Irving attempts to square an emancipated, profeminist stance with a profoundly conservative defense of the family, and because he is such a good storyteller he almost pulls it off. The novel evokes the positive side of family life with vivid conviction, and Garp's unorthodox household—he stays home with the kids and writes; his wife, Helen, is a college professor—is both credible and appealing. But ultimately the author's conservatism takes over the book. Both he and his protagonist are Victorians (or Freudians) at heart, bemused by what they see as the foolishness of sex, distrustful of its anarchic potential. For Garp the paradigmatic act of violence and evil is rape, which he uneasily connects with his own lust, judging his predatory, impersonal seduction of a teen-age babysitter a "rapelike situation." Directly or not, sex—particularly infidelity, the paradigmatic betrayal of the family tie—causes most of the 169 A M E R I C A N G I R L S W A N T E V E R Y T H I N G trouble in the novel. Though Irving is committed to the central importance of the family as a source of human values, he does not hold with the myth of the family as a haven in a violent world: the world is us, our dangerous sexuality. This attitude is bound up with the most traditional kind of sexism. Irving regards lust as men's besetting sin,and implies that women—at least the right sort of women—are more admirable than men because they are less subject to this weakness. (The two women in the book who are preoccupied with sex are portrayed with utter condescension— one is a pathetic, stupid adolescent; the other a slob, a failed wife, and an incompetent mother.) Nor does Irving's horror of rape reflect feminist consciousness; from a feminist perspective rape is not, as the novel renders it, an expression of bestial impulses unfettered by civilized morality, but an assertion of power and woman-hatred, a patriarchal perversion. In the book's climactic episode, Helen Garp's affair with astudent leads to a gruesome accident in which one of the Garp children dies, another loses an eye, and Helen bites off her lover's penis. Helen's infidelity is nearly as exploitative as her husband's (though her motives have less to do with lust than with anger at Garp); she begins sleeping with Michael Milton in part because he is too much of a lightweight to take seriously. When Garp finds out, Helen calls Michael and summarily dumps him.He is distraught . Helen, who takes for granted her right to make all the rules, is annoyed that he won't just slink off without a fuss. Instead , he insists on coming to see her, with disastrous results. Though he ends up worse off than any of the surviving Garps, he gets no discernible sympathy, either from Helen or from the author , who turns him into a mean joke, everyhusband's fantasy of the perfect revenge. Except for a few offhand and/or nasty references to his condition, he disappears from the book; he and his feelings are irrelevant, outside the purview of the Garps' anguish for each other. Irving makes it hard for the reader to care about Michael Milton; he is an unattractive character, and the situation is ludicrous. But in giving Milton such a horrifying fate (at least it 170 Postscript: The Backlash According to Irving horrified me), Irving overplays his hand. Unless you get off on the idea of single men being castrated for fucking married women, the Garps' reaction seems callous (particularly since it was Garp's jealousy and carelessness that caused the accident) and the author's special pleading becomes intrusive. Garp would have been a more honest novel had Irving been willing to present the boy's mutilation as tragic—like the death of little Walt Garp—instead of comic. After all, what better metaphor for the traditionalist's belief in the wages of sexual sin...