My favorite 20th century novel. John Irving confronts the big questions: faith, friendship and fate in this dark tragicomedy of a peculiarly small boy with a peculiarly piercing voice. Impossible to summarize without trivializing its power, but once you read Owen's story, you will never look at baseball, Christmas pageants, or armadillos the same way again.

Love this book

Forget the movie - it has little semblance to the book. One of my top ten favourites, I have read and re-read this book many times and will undoubtedly read it again one day. Four-star rating from me - storytelling does not get much better than this.

John Irving is a terriffic writer, but he drones on and on in this well told, but kind of boring tale about John Wheelright and his best friend through the years. The prose is beautifully written, but he does go on about mystical belief in God, his personal feeling about Christianity, and the like. The religious message was a little too blind faith and "purpose" oriented for my taste, and I personally thought the characters were relatable to an extent, but also very very unlikable at times (especially the character of Owen Meany himself). But overall, a pretty good read because of the very skillfully crafted prose.

Irving is a genius at creating densely rich worlds peopled with quirky and imperfect individuals who travel a long and tortuous path to their ultimate goal, and oftentimes, their redemption as well. Owen Meany is a funny little guy with a funny little voice who grows into a larger-than-life quasi-religious figure who overcomes his physical disadvantages to improbably dominate and shape his milieu against fearsome odds. Is he the second coming of Jesus? Is he a prophet? A magician? A great actor? The devil? I like Irving more with every book of his that I read. He often foreshadows the book's climax, which he delays exposing until nearly the end, and builds a story in the present, while dipping often and at length into the past while foreshadowing the future. This trick is a lot harder than it looks, but it's one that Irving does exceedingly well and to maximum effect in enriching, elaborating and unwinding the story. It's a technique he uses particularly well in a later novel, "Last Night in Twisted River" which I would also highly recommend. This is vintage Irving and a great read. Enjoy.

Absolutely beautiful.

The greatest of all accidents is an accidental birth - unless it is an accidental death... which brings us back to the first sentence of Owen Meany: I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. A spectacular read - you will never regret spending time trying to understand what was behind Owen Meany.

I found this to be a bit long. There are a lot of descriptive passages that are interesting and well written, but don’t seem to directly move the story line along, at least from my perspective. But you have to read them all because some sections seem like they might fit into this category, and then it turns out that they do actually have a direct bearing on the story. At any rate, Irving is a great story teller and the story of Owen is really a great story. The themes of belief and Christianity and growing up and lost parents and weird parents and politics are all in there.

The first 50 pages are a bit like trudging through taffy, but pretty soon it soars. You know, like that dream you once had about flying so close over a field of yellow daisies in the foothills of a mountain range, you were flying so low that you felt the petals grazing your gut.

I got into this book, but then I put it down and did not want to pick it up again. I think maybe the story was not for me.