The World According to Garp
An oddly buoyant man in a world of hard landings
“The important thing is to live before you die,” the mother explains to her child. “It can be a real adventure having a life.”
It so happens that young T.S. Garp has already had one adventure that nearly ended his life. Playing airplane pilot on a roof one night he took an unexpected dive over the edge. Even so, Garp never stops wanting to be what his dead father was: an aviator. But Garp never flies, literally or figuratively, except there is some kind of crash afterwards.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP is a world where a lot of people are trying to fly: not above the ground, but above mundanity and convention. Those who make it undergo turbulence and hard landings but for awhile, anyway, their lives have adventure, an air-in-the-face freshness.
The star of this flying circus is T.S. Garp, writer, wrestler and househusband, whose life the story chronicles. The Ringmaster, though, is his mother, Jenny Fields, the nurse and nucleus to most of the eccentrics in Garp’s life, himself included.
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Jenny runs a sanitarium where victimized women can come to get over or incubate their grudges against men. Among the wounded in her care are a sex-changed football player and members of a sorority that practices tongue amputation as a form of protest.
Jenny is a little strange, herself. Not only does she lack a sex drive, she has a total lack of sexual scruples. Wanting a baby but not a romance she drafts the services of a male patient, a bedfast flier who is a mental vegetable but still virile. The result of the collaboration is Garp.
Who could live among such freaks and turn out normal? Garp doesn’t, but maybe in some ways he’s better than normal. He has his mother’s open-mindedness without her blindness to crackpottery—he has no patience with the tongue whackers for example—and he has inherited Jenny’s vast sympathy.
In Jenny, the sympathy is composed and practical. In Garp it is a passion. He broods for months over the troubles of a rape victim he hasn’t met then writes a self-jeopardizing novel in her defense. He wages war with a reckless driver who is imperiling the neighborhood children.
Most of all Garp is passionate about his wife and kids. For him a fun date is hiring a babysitter so he and his wife can window-peek at the kids having a good time.
Of all Jenny’s brood of unconventionals, Garp is the most successful. He isn’t the macho villain so despised by his mother’s followers, but he hasn’t jettisoned his manhood, either, as Roberta the ex-football player has. And he’s not unorthodox for show, as the tongueless sorority are.
“There’s two things I’m natural at,” he tells his wife. “Wrestling and being a family man.” He’s not a showoff or a a sissy, but just an uninhibitedly sentimental male.
The movie is a fine adaptation of John Irving’s novel, in spite of much abridgment and some changes in plot. There is a careful use of symbolism and counterpoint and the dialogue is full of clever ambiguities.
The acting might have been better, however. Robin Williams (of “Mork and Mindy”) is a little too goofy at times and Mary Beth Hurt as Garp’s wife frequently seems too young for the role, like a child playing grownup. The non-actors who play Garp’s children don’t even have the redeeming quality of being cute.
As a whole, though, the movie recreates the novel’s interesting blend of seriousness and play. Garp’s world is happy and heartbreaking, hilarious and somber. It has something to say about morality, but it’s main point is about being happy in a precipitous world.
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1. Published in the “Washington Missourian” October 17, 1982