I don’t read fiction to be preached to, or to get taught history. It felt too soap-boxy for my tastes and I skimmed those sections as fast as I possibly could. I get the parts about the Vietnam war when we get to that, since it’s directly relevant to their own story, but I think most of the other historical bull cocky could’ve been excised without anything of worth being lost. It felt like half this book was John just giving us an angry history lesson about Ronald Reagan. Next there was the endless ranting about politics. Like, I get teenagers are sex-crazed, but… I more than reached my limit with this book. One even made Owen pop a boner as the Christ Child during a school play.

Or there’s Owen propositioning another student’s mother for sex because she dared suggest Marilyn Monroe was having sexual relations with JFK? Or basically any woman in the book being reduced to their sex appeal or lack thereof. Then there’s John’s cousin Hester, who John spends much of the early stages of the novel having inappropriate thoughts about, and who he spends the rest of the novel describing as (I’m paraphrasing) probably drunk and/or shacking up with countless men. In one case, they went about comparing and contrasting the breasts of all the women they knew to hers. I lost track of how many times Owen and John had talks about the breasts of John’s own mother, for instance. On top of that, he’s a shining example of one of my biggest qualms with the book: the rampant misogyny. He did nothing but start shit with everyone of all ages, friend or foe, and take it to unnecessary extremes, all the while convinced that he simply knew everything, including the day and manner of his own death. All he did was dig his own hole deeper and deeper and push people away further and further, yet people stuck by him for some reason, and in some cases even seemed to celebrate him. To think that anybody, even his friend John Wheelwright, would come to bat (pun intended) for him willingly struck me as increasingly peculiar. To begin with, Owen Meany himself is an insufferable little twit.

If this had been assigned reading for me, I would’ve done what I did with Tess of the d’Urbervilles (which our main character amusingly enough teaches his students later on in the book) back in 12th grade AP English and resorted to SparkNotes rather than read any further. She kept promising me it would get better, but I struggled to find a single redeeming element to keep me pushing forward. I couldn’t help but break that rule, though, because my word this was a slog. Wouldn’t you know she found that exact book at a Goodwill for me shortly after mentioning it? Naturally, she made it her mission to make me read it, telling me I couldn’t read any other books until I finished it. Not long ago, my fiancee told me about this book she had to read back in high school that she hated for most of her time reading it, yet wound up liking in the end.

Say a prayer for owen meany