Garp's search for where he belongs

The first time I read this book was in high school. The second time I read this book I was 23. It meant much more the second time.

With good literature it's easy to get distracted by the surface events of the story. If anything is obscene or lascivious, it's easy to not take it for what it's really worth. The first time I read this book, I was left with the impression that it was dirty. It was graphically violent and sexual; interesting but very weird. Reading it again with a little more maturity, I realize that my first opinion was immature. It was simply that the graphic parts were what was filed in my memory.

At heart, The World According to Garp is about a man who is trying to find his place in the world. Thanks to his mother's eccentric decisions, he must grow up fatherless and without any real connection to normalcy. This provides him with the opportunity to develop a unique character, unlike all of the plebeians that populate the world.

He finds his place as a writer, but gets quickly hidden in the shadow of his mother's writing. He tries to make art, while she writes the story of her life, which Garp is contemptuous of. She gains a celebrity which will forever displace him from being able to find where he belongs. Everything he does is slightly warped from being the son of Jenny Fields and, ultimately, he loses his place as her son because she becomes an icon that makes her bigger than just a person or just a mother.

This, of course, is just a synopsis of what I found to be a major theme of the book. It would be far too long of a review to try to cover all of Garp's misadventures in growing up, starting his own family, and finding his own literary celebrity.