Reviews
"Three or four times as funny as most novels." -- The New Yorker "John Irving, it is abundantly clear, is a true artist. He is not afraid to take on great themes." -- Los Angeles Times "Friendship, marriage, and family are his primary themes, but at that blundering level of life where mishap and folly--something close to joyful malice--perpetually intrude and distrupt, often fatally. Life, in [John] Irving's fiction, is always under siege. Harm and disarray are daily fare, as if the course of love could not run true. . . . Irving's multiple manner . . . his will to come at the world from different directions, is one of the outstandint traits of The World According to Garp, but this remarkable flair for . . . stories inside stories . . . isalready handled with mastery . . . and with a freedom almost wanton in The Water-Method Man [which is Garp's predecessor by six years]." --Terrence Des Pres "Brutal reality and hallucination, comedy and pathos. A rich, unified tapestry." -- Time
