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The World According to Garp

The World According to Garp is a novel by John Irving. Published in 1978, the book was a bestseller for years; Irving has subsequently become one of the most "bankable" modern American novelists.

The story deals with Garp, the son of a ball-turret gunner who was effectively reduced to a mental vegetable by a piece of shrapnel which pierced his head; his mother, Jenny Fields, is a strong-willed nurse who wants a child but not a husband (and has no interest in sex except as a means to the end of having a child), and so rapes the bedridden Technical Sergeant Garp to impregnate herself. Her parents are both wealthy and shocked; Garp's mother raises Garp without their support, taking a position at a boys' school. She becomes a well-known feminist speaker after publishing an auto-biography called A Sexual Suspect (referring to the general assessment of her as an unwed mother). Meanwhile Garp becomes interested in wrestling, sex, and writing: three topics which his mother seems to have a rudimentary and unemotional interest in.

The book contains some elements that appear in almost all John Irving novels: bears, wrestling, Vienna and a complex Dickensian plot that spans the protagonist's whole life.

The novel was adapted by Steve Tesich into a screenplay for a 1982 movie directed by George Roy Hill and starring Robin Williams as Garp. Glenn Close played Fields, and John Lithgow was featured as Roberta Muldoon, a transsexual former football player.