SOURCE: Larson, Charles R. Review of The World according to Garp, by John Irving. Chicago Tribune 131, no. 113 (23 April 1978): section 7, pp. 1, 4.

In the following review, Larson discusses the central themes of sex, marriage, and parenthood in The World according to Garp, calling the work “one of the most original (and readable) novels of the last few years.”

Boston, 1942. Nurse Jenny Fields, the 22-year-old, head-strong daughter of a textiles tycoon, decides that she wants to be a mother—without the complicating attachments of marriage and husband. No easy matter in those pre-Women's Lib days, with all the young men away fighting in Europe, not to say anything about conventional attitudes toward pregnancy and child-rearing. But Jenn finds her man (Technical Sergeant Garp, lobotomized by the war), who impregnates her just before his fatal regression back to the fetal stage. “She never did it with him again,” the child, named T...