SOURCE: Cosgrove, William. “The World according to Garp as Fabulation.” South Carolina Review 19, no. 2 (spring 1987): 52-8.

In the following essay, Cosgrove asserts that The World according to Garp bucks the literary trends of experimentation popular in the late twentieth century and revives the storytelling forms and techniques of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The experimental novel of the 1960's and 1970's has been increasingly subjected to some long overdue criticism. Recently such diverse critics as Malcolm Cowley, John Gardner, and Anthony Burgess have deplored the loss in contemporary fiction of the ancient art of storytelling with plot, characters, and setting in harmony. In different ways, each writer has attacked the excessive verbal pyrotechnics, narcissistic navel-gazing, and intellectual overkill in American novels of these two decades. Burgess and Gardner call for a rehabilitation of the moral sense and the integrity of character development while all three ask writers to...