jenny felt that her education was merely a polite way to bide time, as if she were really a cow, being prepared only for the insertion of the device for artificial insemination. The recommendation of Wellesley had come from her older brothers, who had assured her parents that Wellesley women were not thought of loosely and were considered high in marriage potential.

In fact, she had dropped out of college when she suspected that the chief purpose of her parents' sending her to Wellesley had been to have her dated by and eventually mated to some well-bred man. In jenny's opinion, her breasts were too large she thought the ostentation of her bust made her look 'cheap and easy.' She was an athletic-looking young woman who always had high color in her cheeks she had dark, glossy hair and what her mother called a mannish way of walking (she swung her arms), and her rump and hips were so slender and hard that, from behind, she resembled a young boy. She had dropped out of college almost as soon as she'd begun, but she had finished her nursing-school program at the head of her class and she enjoyed being a nurse.

The soldier moved once more and sat beside her.

In the movie theater she had to move three times, but each time the soldier moved closer to her until she was sitting against the musty wall, her view of the newsreel almost blocked by some silly colonnade, and she resolved she would not get up and move again. This was shortly after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and people were being tolerant of soldiers, because suddenly everyone was a soldier, but jenny Fields was quite firm in her intolerance of the behavior of men in general and soldiers in particular. The masochistic gifted-victim game has been played in recent American writing on just about every conceivable level, but Irving's novel is still something special: he created a whole hideous and deformed women's political group (the Ellen Jamesians) in order to have his author-hero, his alter ego, destroyed by it, and the film is faithful to Irving's 'vision.Garp's mother Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater. If you listen to what Garp (Robin Williams) says, the movie is about love of family if you look at what happens, though, it's a castration fantasy. Tongues, ears, penises, eyes, lives-everybody on the screen is losing something. This isn't necessarily bad-Hill's pastel, detached, and generally meaningless comedy may, in some ways, be preferable to the baroque apparatus that Irving constructed-but in recounting the book's key incidents Hill and Tesich lay bare the pattern of mutilations in the plot. Pauline Kael gave this movie a middling review: 'The movie version of John Irving's novel, directed by George Roy Hill, from a script by Steve Tesich, has no center it's a simple series of vignettes, spanning Garp's life from his beginning to his end.

Book the world according to garp