Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.

The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. --Tim Appelo

In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys—best friends—are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy’s mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn’t believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God’s instrument. What happens to Owen, after that 1953 foul ball, is extraordinary and terrifying.

A Prayer for Owen Meany was first published in 1989. This Modern Library edition includes a new Introduction by the author.

My recent purchase of A Prayer for Owen Meany was as a gift. Having read that work many years ago, as well as many other Irving books, I believe this to be his best. It is one that I recommend consistently to family and friends, and have found agreement with that opinion in those quarters.

Most of the negative reviews here are either completely missing an interpretive point of Irving's novel or they had certain expectations that were not met upon finishing. For one reviewer, it's contrived and implausible, and for another reviewer it insults Christianity. But Christianity is hardly (what I think is) the point...while contrived and implausible are exactly what the characters fight so hard for - and against - in this fantastic novel. It's ambitious, if not somewhat tedious. But it delivers.

I've never read Irving, and I faintly recall "Simon Birch" (and now I perfectly understand why Irving didn't want to be associated with the movie). I picked up "A Prayer For Owen Meany" because, as juvenile as it sounds, I'm like the band Jimmy Eat World and their song "Goodbye Sky Harbor" is taken completely from the final scene in the novel.

I wasn't expecting much when I began, but I had to suspend my initial belief for some of the plot events. Yes, some of the scenes felt contrived. Irving comes across as rather unctuous, and sometimes even self-righteous. I was nonetheless very entertained by the events and amazed at the intricate world Irving creates.

Enough has been said about the plot. Suffice it to say that I haven't read a book that kept me (willingly) up until dawn since I was eighteen. And I haven't felt my heart literally break for a character, as well as disappointment at finishing a novel, since I was fourteen when I read "Les Miserables" for the first time.

There are things I dislike about this book. At times, the tone comes across as cynical, despondent, and dour, but is intended to be playfully rueful. I had to use a dictionary a number of times and thought at first that it was very self-appreciating of Irving. But I began to see a thematic pattern in the verbiage that was satirical and at times even clever. Also, it's possible you'll never misuse a semi-colon once you finish this book since it's used so often - but it is sometimes used to excess.

All that aside, I loved this novel enough to get on here and write my first review, even though I've used Amazon for years. The characters wrestle with determinism/predestination, faith, loneliness, guilt, forgiveness, displacement, fear and death - and in surprising ways. Most of all, it is about infidelity with others and with oneself; compromise, hypocrisy and honesty...and storytelling itself. These struggles are set against the independent backdrop of religion, war and the caustic aftertaste of the illusory, postmodern American dream. To put it another way, Irving satisfyingly accomplishes what Yann Martel merely attempts with his more arrogant, overbearing "Life of Pi."

I recommend this book with a few reservations, but I recommend that you read it slowly and with an open mind. It's not nearly as bad as the other reviewers make it out to be - at least, not for the same reasons. I believe it sets out to ask: "At what moral point does responsibility meet fidelity, and can belief reconcile delusion with doubt?" If these questions interest you, you may find a few possible answers in "A Prayer For Owen Meany." Perhaps, like myself and others, you'll even find attachment to the characters halfway through. And you may also find your heart torn apart with heartbreak for the last pages and with disappointment for having come to the end, wanting to stay and finding that - like the narrator - you'll be forever "doomed" to remember that final scene with Owen Meany...and the prayer.

This is my very favorite book of my life! It is filled with memorable characters and circumstances. Laced with humor even through trials and the Viet Nam war. If you haven't yet read this book - do yourself a favor. It is incredible and you will remember it for the rest of your life!

What more is there to say about this book? It is an incredible read and I would rate this among my favorites of all time. Owen will be with me for a long time to come. Buy this book, sit back and enjoy the ride.

Not only is this book horrifically offensive to Christianity by comparing an irritating and presumptuously arrogant dwarf to Jesus, but it is also in need of major editing. I won't bore anyone with a description of the plot, since it's one of the most lackluster stories I've ever read. This book meanders in the sections in which the narrator describes his present-day life. Also, it gives endless boring descriptions of characters that nobody cares about. It's all "telling" and no "showing". The imagery is something that a first-grader could have come up with ("the lake was wonderful," "the grass was wonderful," "the pines were wonderful," etc.)
If this book had been written by a rookie writer, it never would have been published. It's only because John Irving's name was on it that it got published. Anyone who thinks it's the best book they've ever read (as many of these reviewers do) sorely needs to get a life. A complete bore, "Owen Meany" isn't worth the wood-sludge that it was printed on.

ABSOLUTE 0/5!!!!!