A Prayer for Owen Meany
John Irving (1989)
“Owen Meany is the smallest boy in Gravesend, New Hampshire. He speaks entirely in capital letters. He believes God has chosen him for a purpose. When his foul ball kills his best friend's mother, a chain of events begins that will prove him right.”
At a Glance
John Wheelwright narrates the story of his best friend, Owen Meany, a stunted, squeaky-voiced boy who believes he is an instrument of God. After Owen hits a foul ball that kills John's mother in a Little League game, the two boys grow up together through the turbulent 1960s in small-town New Hampshire. Owen's unshakable conviction that he knows the date and manner of his own death drives the novel toward a climax in which faith, sacrifice, and the Vietnam War collide in ways that vindicate every strange thing Owen ever believed about himself.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published in 1989, A Prayer for Owen Meany became the defining American novel about faith in an age of doubt. It revived the Dickensian social novel for a contemporary audience, proved that literary fiction could take religious experience seriously without becoming devotional literature, and created one of the most memorable characters in postwar American fiction. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and remains a staple of high school and college curricula.
Diction Profile
Warm, Dickensian, discursive — long sentences rich with physical detail, social observation, and comic digression, punctuated by Owen's UPPERCASE declarations that cut through the narrative like prophecy.
Moderate. Irving's primary figurative mode is the extended symbolic object