I finished The World According To Garp today. I liked it a lot. I did. It was funny, the characters were interesting, the story was dynamite, it had Important things to say without being too heady -- I recommend it. But, like, I need to take several literary baths.[1] It's like I ate a bunch of pizza for lunch: I enjoyed it at the time, but now that I've completed it, I don't feel good.
Hard to believe, but a ton more stuff happens after the castration. Garp starts writing again -- a new novel, called The World According to Bensenhaver, about a crochety old investigator who deals with rape cases. Garp is dealing with some shit and he works out his demons through his writing. Irving includes the first chapter of Bensenhaver in The World According to Garp. It is gross.[2]
The first chapter sets the stage with a man, Oren Rath, entering a woman's house with a fishing knife. Hope Standish is just chillin' with her kid and Oren's like, "I'm going to rape you now and then kill you." Hope's friend gets into the house and flees with Hope's son, but Oren takes Hope in his truck and drives her around a bit.[3] Eventually, he's driving, and she decides that she's got to get out of this alive by any means necessary.
Hope gets Oren to pull the car over -- she can't let him drive off too far, or she'll be too hard to find later -- by putting her head in his lap[4] and blowing on his penis through his jeans. Oren starts driving all crazy -- see, there's not enough blood in his body for his brain and his pecker -- so he pulls over to the side of the road to "have" Hope.
Oren overpowers Hope and begins raping her in his truck;[5] they don't go out into the nearby field because Oren can't wait any longer. People drive past, but they assume it's just another people-banging-each-other-on-the-side-of-the-road-real-casual-nothing-to-see-here encounter and don't do anything. Okay, so he's raping Hope and her survival instincts kick in. Oren is absolutely going to kill her after he's finished, so something has to be done.
Hope feels around the truck a bit and finds Oren's knife. While he is still inside her, she disembowels him. He dies, but not before leaking blood and shit all over her.[6] The police, including Bensenhaver, rescue poor shit-covered Hope. That's it. The end.
The World According to Bensenhaver is an incredible sales success despite its middling reviews. Garp goes back to Vienna at the recommendation of the book's publisher so as to avoid its inevitable backlash. Wolf (the publisher) is employing some less-than-holistic marketing -- capitalizing on his relationship to Jenny Fields and the accident that killed Walt and maimed Duncan -- so Garp gets away from that before it becomes truly unbearable. The book is also seen as both pro- and anti-feminist. Garp becomes frustrated. "It's made up!"
While Garp is in Vienna, Jenny Fields (his mother, faithful reader) is assassinated at a gathering of feminists. She starts delivering a speech and is shot by a man with a hunting rifle. The shooter is killed immediately after, but Jenny's super-dead. Garp comes home, where Jenny has a "Feminist Funeral." No men are allowed, so Garp has to dress in drag to attend his mother's funeral.[7]
Garp and Helen have a daughter, Jenny. A few years pass and not that much happens. Garp becomes the wrestling coach at the Steering School and Helen agrees to teach there -- they're allowing girls to attend now, see. Anyway, Garp is shot and killed by Bainbridge "Pooh" Percy[8] and then Irving provides this overlong[9] epilogue that wraps everything in a neat little bow.
The end.
If you need some eye-bleach after reading this -- or "Guts," which you definitely should just avoid forever -- then I recommend googling "Puppy gif" or taking a trip to r/aww.
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[1] A palate cleanser, but for books. Something inoffensive -- did Mr. Rogers[*] write any books?↩
[2] I mean this. Children, stop reading; parents, you've been warned. Shit's about to get graphic. (You'll get that pun in a second.)↩
[3] I am skipping quite a bit here. The chapter is long and it immediately follows the castration-by-biting so really it's a lot to take in at once.↩
[4] ARE YOU SEEING THE PARALLELS TO THE AFOREMENTIONED CASTRATION SCENE?↩
[5] I'll spare you the big description of this, but rest assured it's very detailed. This whole scene actually made me very uncomfortable, not unlike Chuck Palahniuk's "Guts"[+] short story.↩
[6] Would you believe I'm actually sparing you? I've trimmed this down from the nearly page-long description and I've not mentioned what happens with his dick at all, so, like, you're welcome.↩
[7] This is one of the more overtly-political parts of the book. Jenny explicitly told Garp that she did not want any sort of big funeral: give her body to science, be done with it. Instead, because she's a Feminist Icon, her wishes are tossed aside by people who at best want to mourn together and at worst want to use her. It's probably more about the Hivemind absorbing people who define their ethos more than feminism explicitly, but w/e.↩
[8] Did I establish who this was? Ugh. Okay. Back in his school years, Garp made fuck with a girl named Cushie, who was Pooh's older sister. Cushie died years later in childbirth, but Pooh was convinced -- somehow -- that Garp had fornicated her to death. She held on to this grudge for like 15 years and eventually kills him.↩
[9] And out of place, frankly.↩
[*] "You've made today special for everyone who knows you just by being you. No one in the entire world is exactly like you. I like you just the way you are."↩
[+] Don't even read that, honestly. Just don't. I had to do it in two sittings -- not because it's too long to read all at once, but because I physically had to step away from it for a while. It is the single most graphic, squirm-inducing thing I have ever read. It's to Mr. Palahniuk's credit that it's so effective, but -- I'm serious -- don't go into that expecting to not pace around your room for a while afterwards.↩
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