A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

I'm enjoying A Prayer for Owen Meany. Some parts are so funny. I'd forgotten that. In one part where Dan Needham comes to the house and meets the family, I laughed out loud. It tells how the adults all go into the living room, which is full of antique furniture "which my grandmother was preserving, for historical reasons, sitting in them was not good for them....and so a guest, his or her knees already bending in the act of sitting down, would suddenly snap to attention as my grandmother shouted, 'Oh, for goodness sake, not there! You can't sit there!'" Dan Needham is tall and has a "sizeable bottom" so even fewer seats were available to him, plus the maid Lydia in a wheelchair blocks the way here and there. It says, "And so the living room was a scene of idiocy and confusion,..." I loved that "idiocy and confusion". It reminded me of some of Barbara Pym's remarks about her character's "wild" thoughts. And the scene where Owen is in the mother's bed and the grandmother comes in, all wet, and Owen screams. That's another one that makes me laugh out loud.

There's a LOT of foreshadowing in this book. If any English teacher ever wanted examples of foreshadowing for their students, they could find one on almost every other page.

I'm enjoying it and knew I had liked it last time I read it. So far I'm not sure why it would be considered something that changes your thoughts. But perhaps that is yet to come.