A review by zaralei
The World According to Garp by John Irving

5.0

This book was delightful. Irving’s writing is concise and comic, his characters fresh and familiar. He masterfully will sow some seeds — motifs, little details, seemingly “side stories” — and then have huge crescendos up to a climax where those once innocuous details crash together in an epic, tragic incident that was both out-of-nowhere but also completely inevitable. It’s a wholly original book, but like all Irving novels, you’re so engrossed that it feels more like a folk tale or your family history than spectacle.