After his mother’s death, Johnny Wheelwright finds his best friend Owen Meany’s entire baseball card collection on his front porch.
The boys are only ten or so. And when Johnny asks his chronically-drunk yet perpetually-wise step-father Dan what Owen was thinking, Dan has the insight to know that Owen wants Johnny to return the cards exactly as Owen gave them away.
And Johnny does. Then he reciprocates, giving Owen his favorite stuffed animal, a terrifyingly, thrillingly realistic toy armadillo.
The boys mourn their tragedy through their simple yet precious possessions. And Johnny reflects:
Owen and I couldn’t have talked about those things – at least, not then. So we gave each other our best-loved possessions, and hoped to get them back. When you think of it, that’s not so silly.
In A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, Johnny Wheelwright tells the story of Owen Meany, diminutive in stature and epic in persona, who from the age of eleven believes himself to be GOD’S INSTRUMENT. As they hurtle through their adolescence towards what Owen believes to be his predestined end, they encounter the armless American Indian totem Watahantowet, Johnny’s sexy older cousin Hester the Molester, an enthusiastically fornicating teacher -couple the Brinker-Smiths, the dolorous and eternally doubtful Reverend Mr. Merrill, Johnny’s formidable grandmother and matriarch of Gravesend Harriet Wheelwright, and a supplicating statue of Mary Magdalene affectionately known as “the Holy Goalie.”
Owen, in turn, unwittingly murders Johnny’s mother, plays the role of not only the Ghost of Christmas Future but also the Christ Child Himself in several amateur theater productions, and ensures that Johnny is not drafted to go to Vietnam with the aid of a granite saw and a lot of rubbing alcohol, but not all in that order.
In high school, Owen becomes The VOICE, a columnist and tastemaker in the Gravesend Academy newspaper. A legend in his own time (at least in Gravesend), Owen takes his small celebrity for granted, yet remains deeply loyal to Johnny. And Johnny watches everything, Joseph to Owen’s Jesus, but secure in the knowledge that Owen will lead him through anything they face.
Many years after the death of Johnny’s mom, he and Owen find themselves at another turning point. And Owen tells his best friend,
“I LOVE YOU,” Owen told me. “NOTHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU – TRUST ME.”
And Johnny does.
In the end of the story, Owen and Johnny spend a day drunk out of their minds in a swimming pool in Arizona, playing what Owen calls THE REMEMBER GAME. As they tell themselves the stories of their own lives, the boys-now-men build a temple of friendship and a shelter against the separate challenges they are each about to face.
Owen, as he foresaw, dies the next day.
Johnny, you may or may not be surprised to hear, goes on to be an English teacher.
But his life, and faith, rest on his friendship with Owen and with the stories of his memory and of their friendship.
This book changed me when I read it as a teenager. But it has always stood somewhere beyond my ability to articulate just why I found it so transformative. I think I worried that, like the boys exchanging toys in their time of grief, if I tried to say what it really meant to me, it might destroy something.
But when I read it again, as an adult, in discussing this moment in the story with a friend, he told me what I had been trying to say. As children, at the same time that they express their grief without speaking of it, Owen and Johnny hit the truest aim of friendship:
“We want to be able to offer all of ourselves to someone, trust them with it, and lose nothing.”
This is a novel about a million things, all important: it is about friendship, friendship of the purest, most transformative kind. It is about faith in something – a person, a goal, a destiny.And it is about stories: the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, the forces that drive them, and the ways they let us build meaning and thereby keep faith itself whole.
We must have faith in our own stories. We devise the heroes of our own mythologies; we worship at the altar of those rare relationships where we give each other our best-loved, most secretly guarded wants and needs and get them back, not only as we gave them, but with the reassurance that they are real and valuable, as are we.
When you think of it, that’s not so silly.
