Writer and poet May Sarton prefaces her 1968 memoir Plant Dreaming Deep with an untitled poem whose last two lines are “…Homeward at last toward the native source /Seasoned and stretched to plant his dreaming deep.”
John Irving’s breakthrough novel The World According to Garp (1978) won the National Book Award and was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. Showing his versatility, he also received an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Cider House Rules (2000) and a Lambda Literary Award, given to writers addressing LGBTQ+ issues, in 2013 for In One Person. A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) is the best-selling of his 16 novels.
The setting is but a backdrop. While the storyline of the novel entertainingly grabs the reader’s interest, you can’t help but root for Victoria and Lucien, it is the humor that kept me glued to the page.
I moved to Manchester in September, 1978, from the Connecticut flatlands. I was just in time to witness the dart-in-the-forehead angst of Red Sox Nation when Yankee Bucky Dent sent the Sox crashing in a flaming spiral, and then the publication by Viking Press of the novel The Dogs of March by Ernest Hebert.