When people fell from the sky and turned into animals in The Satanic Verses, it wasn’t a problem because you could tell Rushdie was using magical realism to prove a point. When Alex and his gang broke into houses and raped women in A Clockwork Orange it was disturbing but made sense in a dystopian novel. When Chief started talking about listening machines in the walls in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest it didn’t phase me because he was in an asylum at the time. But with Garp, all the characters are basically normal people but have the most messed-up lives of just about any book I have read.
The novel starts with nurse Jenny Fields, a young woman who is so practical as to have almost no emotions besides a strong maternal instinct. She decides she wants to have a baby but has no interest in men or romance, so she essentially rapes a nearly-braindead and dying young soldier in her hospital in order to impregnate herself. Weird. And things start getting more strange from there.
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