The first time frame is the perspective of John in the present day (1987). The story is narrated in two interwoven time frames. The story is narrated by John Wheelwright, a former citizen of New Hampshire who has become a voluntary expatriate from the United States, having settled in Toronto and taken on Canadian citizenship. A Prayer for Owen Meany, however, follows an independent and separate plot. The main characters of both novels, Owen Meany and Oskar Matzerath, share the same initials as well as some other characteristics, and their stories show some parallels. Grass was a great influence for John Irving, as well as a close friend.
The novel is also an homage to Günter Grass's most famous novel, The Tin Drum. According to John's narration, Owen is a remarkable boy in many ways he believes himself to be God's instrument and sets out to fulfill the fate he has prophesied for himself.
Published in 1989, it tells the story of John Wheelwright and his best friend Owen Meany growing up together in a small New Hampshire town during the 1950s and 1960s. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God.A Prayer for Owen Meany is the seventh novel by American writer John Irving. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum-the two characters share the same initials. 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. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy-from Vietnam to the Contras. 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. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in.
The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. 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. 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. 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.
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