The first sentence of A Son of the Circus is enhanced by the subtitle to the first chapter, which is tempting all by itself—Blood from Dwarfs. The first sentence merely serves to deepen the mystery. “Usually, the dwarfs kept bringing him back—back to the circus and back to India.”
And my 2001 novel, The Fourth Hand, offers a traditional first sentence of the keep-reading kind. “Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event—the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age.” The reader is forewarned that a grisly accident is about to happen; few readers will look away from grisly accidents.
The greatest of all accidents, of course, is an accidental death, which brings me back to the first sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany. “I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
The semicolon helps, but the clause that follows it was a risk; doubtless there were some readers who’d had it up to here with Christians and stopped right there. I don’t blame them. In the United States today, there is an excess of Christian bragging—too many holier-than-thou zealots in politics, too much righteous indignation in God’s name—but that’s another story. What makes the first sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany such a good one is that the whole novel is contained in it.
I never write the first sentence until I know all the important things that happen in the story, especially—and I mean exactly—what happens at the end of the novel. If I haven’t already written the ending—and I mean more than a rough draft—I can’t write the first sentence.
For example, the idea that Owen Meany is God’s instrument, or that he believes he is—and so does the narrator—is specifically connected not only to Owen’s diminutive size but to the illusion of his weightlessness. That image of how the children can lift Owen over their heads in Sunday school—how he is light enough so they can easily pass him back and forth when the teacher is out of the room—is not only as near to the beginning of the novel as I could find a place for it; that image is echoed at the end of the novel, where Owen’s seeming weightlessness is interpreted to mean that he was always in God’s hands.
But the penultimate paragraph of the novel is naturally the passage I wrote first. “When we held Owen Meany above our heads, when we passed him back and forth—so effortlessly—we believed that Owen weighed nothing at all. We did n
ot realize that there were forces beyond our play. Now I know they were the forces that contributed to our illusion of Owen’s weightlessness; they were the forces we didn’t have the faith to feel, they were the forces we failed to believe in—and they were also lifting up Owen Meany, taking him out of our hands.”
I added the last paragraph, only two sentences long, a day later. “O God—please give him back! I shall keep asking You.”
I didn’t arrive at the first sentence (“I am doomed to remember . . .”) until a year or eighteen months after that.
The origin of that Sunday school image is autobiographical, in part. I was home for Christmas one year—home being Exeter, New Hampshire, the year being 1983 or ’84. I spent the better part of one night with some childhood friends. I hadn’t seen them in years. Morosely, we were remembering our friends who had been killed in Vietnam, or who had returned from the war so badly damaged that they would never recover from it. In addition to these casualties, we included those friends whose lives had been forever changed—in some cases, ruined—because of what extreme measures they took not to go to Vietnam.
The list was depressing; it being Christmas was strangely interwoven with the sadness. Suddenly one of my friends mentioned a name that drew a blank with me—a Russell somebody. Either I never knew him or I didn’t remember him.
Then another of my friends reminded me that, in Sunday school, we used to lift up this little boy; he was our age, about eight or nine, but he was so tiny that we could pass him back and forth over our heads. It enraged him, which was why we did it. It might even have been my idea. At least it was the opinion of my friends that I was the first one to have picked up Russell whatever-his-name-was.
I remembered him instantly. He and his family moved away, long before we were teenagers. I’d had no further contact with him, but someone had heard he’d been killed in Vietnam. I was amazed. I said one of the stupidest things I’ve ever said.
“But he was too small to go to Vietnam!”
My friends looked at me with pity and concern.
“Johnny,” one of them said, “I presume he grew.”
That night I lay awake in bed, pondering the “What if …” that is the beginning of every novel for me. What if he didn’t grow? I was thinking.
At Owen Meany’s burial, one of Owen’s Sunday school classmates remembers how easy he was to lift up. “He was so light—he weighed nothing at all! How could he have been so light?”
Because God already had His hands on him—that’s how.
Because of A Prayer for Owen Meany, many of my readers assume I am “religious.” I go to church only occasionally—like a lot of people, I believe in God in times of crisis. But I have had no religious “experience”; I’ve never been a witness to a miracle. The reason A Prayer for Owen Meany has a first-person narrator is that you can’t have a religious experience or witness a miracle except through the eyes of a believer. And the believer I chose, Johnny Wheelwright, has been so tormented by what happens to his best friend that he is more than a little crazy—as I expect most witnesses to so-called miracles are. Both Johnny Wheelwright’s anger and his craziness are inseparable from what he saw.
The other religious question I am asked about the novel—second only to “Are you a believer?”—is “Do the capital letters mark Owen Meany as a Christ figure, sort of like those red-letter editions of the Bible?”
Sort of, yes. To have Owen speak in red letters might have been too expensive for my publishers, but I also thought the capitals would be more irritating than red letters. Owen’s voice is irritating, not only because of how it sounds but because of how right he is. People who are always right, and are given to reminding us of it, are irritating; prophets are irritating, and Owen Meany is decidedly a prophet.
Because I don’t start a novel until I know the ending, every novel of mine is predestined. In A Prayer for Owen Meany, it was not that much of a stretch to make the main character aware (to some degree) of his own predestination. After all, I am always aware of the predestination of my characters. In Owen’s case, he bears the terrible burden of foreseeing his own death. His tenacious faith tells him that even his death—like his size, like his voice, like practicing the shot—is for a reason.
Separate from the Vietnam background and the apparent religious miracle, A Prayer for Owen Meany is also a novel about the loss of childhood, which I thought was best signified by the loss of a childhood friend. People are always losing things in my novels—not just, as Johnny Wheelwright does, a finger and a mother and a best friend.
In my first novel, Setting Free the Bears, another best friend is lost—stung to death by bees! In my second and third novels, The Water-Method Man and The 158-Pound Marriage, two marriages are lost and a third appears to be mortally compromised. In The World According to Garp, both an eye and a penis are lost—not to mention a child’s life, and a mother’s, and even the life of the main character. In The Hotel New Hampshire, more children die—and another mother, and a grandfather, and a terrorist, and even a bear and a dog. In The Cider House Rules, there are too many casualties to count; and since a major-minor character in A Son of the Circus is a serial killer, suffice it to say that death abounds. I needn’t mention A Widow for One Year—four deaths and another murderer. And the eponymous fourth hand in The Fourth Hand is not a hand at all; it is, rather, the phantom pain the main character feels in his missing left hand, which he has lost twice.
Of course, all good writers repeat themselves, but when repetition is as specific as a sentence, it is usually unconscious.
My first physical description of Owen Meany gave me pause. I loved it, but it sounded like something I’d read before. It struck me as unoriginal; it was so familiar that I worried I was plagiarizing someone. Here is the sentence. “He was the color of a gravestone; light was both absorbed and reflected by his skin, as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times—especially at his temples, where his blue veins showed through his skin (as though, in addition to his extraordinary size, there were other evidence that he was born too soon).”
The sentence struck me, the day I wrote it, as too familiar.
I was sure it was plagiarism. I showed the suspicious sentence to my wife.