People are dying almost from the first page [of The World According to Garp] but by the end the reader is neither bored with death nor hardened to it. Instead, an awful, beautiful aura of appropriateness settles over the novel. It's a strange, Moby Dick-like sense of completeness. One accepts what happens to Irving's characters, even though what happens may make one squirm, protest, or feel real grief. One accepts it because one has come to accept Irving's characters: as people, as friends, even though they too may be grotesque, perverse or sensational.

Irving blurs the line we tend to draw between "ordinary" and violent death, just as he erases the line that in fiction conventionally separates "normal" and perverse characters. In most novels we get one or the other, or we find the normal and the perverse in opposition, fighting over the definition of life. "The...