A Prayer for Owen Meany

A Prayer for Owen Meany is the seventh novel by the American writer John Irving, published in 1989.

John Wheelwright tells the story from Toronto in 1987, where he lives as a voluntary expatriate, and from inside his memories of growing up in Gravesend, New Hampshire, in the 1950s and 1960s. Owen Meany is the friend whose voice, written in capitals in the novel, sounds like nothing else in the town, and whose conviction that he is an instrument of God survives everything that happens to him. The two boys are bound together by the accident with the foul ball, by a shared childhood of Little League, Christmas pageants and a summer of amateur theatricals, and later by the Vietnam War, which divides the country and takes John out of it. Owen's certainty does not make him gentle: he uses his voice on the people around him, argues about miracles with the local minister, and studies the details of his own death the way another boy might study baseball statistics. John's task as narrator is to explain why he says he is a Christian because of Owen, and the book moves between comic set pieces and the slow construction of the prophecy it is built around. Irving has said that The Tin Drum by Günter Grass was a strong influence, and the initials Owen shares with Oskar Matzerath are part of that homage.