Literary Adaptations Week: The World According to Garp (1982)

by Letitia Trent

I read my first John Irving novel, Hotel New Hampshire, when I was sixteen. It was probably the first adult literary novel I’d read beyond the classic paperbacks sold two-for-a-dollar at Wal-Mart.  I was obsessed with the book, both terrified of the world it presented - one in which siblings had marathon sex sessions and a taxidermied pet could, literally, scare somebody to death - and completely convinced by it.  Thus was I introduced to the grotesque juxtaposed with everyday family life - a combo I’ve been attracted to ever since.

The World According to Garp, Irving’s third and probably best-known book, has the same excesses (disaster, taboo sex, absurd turns of plot, and queasy shifts in tone), but instead of a family, it centers itself around the character of T.S. Garp, bastard son of Jenny Fields.  In the novel, Garp functions as a bit of a cipher; he has the least amount of eccentricities or peculiarities of any character, and thus emerges as a kind of everyman at the center of the many bizarre events Irving throws at him.

The sheer strangeness of the book, and the uncertainty of its tone, make it difficult to transition to film. In the 1982 movie version of the novel, director George Roy Hill decided to remain largely faithful to the events and sequencing of the novel, which, while it might have pleased fans of the book, probably did a disservice to the movie.  The many plot points, characters, and events are simply too big to fit into a movie, even a two-hour plus one, resulting in some confusing gaps in plot and bewildering shifts in tone.  Despite these considerable problems, though, The World According to Garp is often saved by the earnestness with which the actors take on their roles.

Garp begins with Jenny Fields - played by Glenn Close with a perfect mix of equanamious affection and single-minded determination - and her newborn son, T.S. Garp.  When we first meet her, Jenny has just had a son out of wedlock with a WWII pilot named Garp.  However, it’s not that simple: Garp is injured - severely brain-damaged - when Jenny encounters him, capable of only of saying his name.  Seeing the opportunity to have a baby without the mess of having a husband, Jenny decides to put Garp (and his constant erection) to good use.  The scenes where Close recounts these lust-less, funny, and a little bit queasy encounters with Garp are some of the best in the entire film.  Close plays Jenny like an innocent - a secular saint who just can’t seem to understand why the world would think any less of her because of her personal choices.

The movie follows Jenny and Garp through their parallel tracks.  Jenny, who doesn’t have an artistic bone in her body, ends up writing an enormous, bestselling novel about her life as a “Sexual Suspect” and becomes a feminist cult figure.  Garp, who wants to be what he calls a ‘real writer’, manages to publish a few well-received novels, but never reaches the kind of fame or readership that he seeks.  This central absurdity is one of the most profound in the movie - Jenny, who pumps out her one novel with efficiency and never writes again, becomes a celebrated writer, all the while seemingly innocent of how to write, how the publishing industry works, and why her book is at all successful. Garp, talented and achingly aware of the challenges of being a writer, struggles.

The movie spends most of its time lingering on Garp and his family life. Garp is played by Robin Williams, who is not my first thought as an everyman, but he does tamp down his manic energy - for the most part - and passes as a thoughtful, writerly-type.  One thing that Williams manages to get perfectly right is the sheer joy and love that Garp has for his children and for the idea of family in general. His Garp is almost more likeable than the Garp that Irving created because he has more personality - more vulnerability, anger, and joy. Unfotunately, events in the movie continually remind Garp (and the viewer) that nothing in life is ever safe from the disasters resulting from the human weaknesses of lust and ideological fervor.

The World According to Garp suffers in that it never gets a chance to establish a clear tone, and this winds up leaving the whole project uncertain.  Whereas the 1984 adaptation of Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire took the most lurid and troubling parts of the book and made them into a comedy, The World According to Garp tries to play the movie as both a comedy and a realistic drama.  The realism of Garp’s family life - his relationship to his wife and children, and his struggle to be a writer - contrast sharply with the exaggerated disasters and violence, often twinged with humor, that run throughout the film. How real are Jenny, Garp, Roberta (John Lithgow, playing a transsexual former football player), and the Ellen James’ (a group of women who cut out their own tongues in protest of male violence) supposed to be? Are they actual characters or merely ideas writ large? Is Jenny supposed to be Irving’s idea of a secular saint of rationality and freedom or an actual real-life woman? Are the Ellen James’ examples of political protest gone wrong or a joke about ideological extremism?

Letitia Trent is a writer, poet, and teacher living in Vermont. Her chapbook, The Medical Diaries, was recently published by Scantily Clad Press.  She keeps a baking blog here.

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