How I ended up reading "A Prayer for Owen Meany" was this: After I graduated from college in 1995, I moved to Southeast Kansas to take a job at a small-town daily newspaper. One of my best friends from college, Brent Graber, was taking a gap year before grad school, so he moved in with me.
That probably saved my life. I was so alone, otherwise.
In any case, Brent enjoyed going to estate sales an picking up stuff cheap. And one time he picked up the "Owen" at such a sale.
When we were at home in the evenings, he read passages to me, laughing with delight. So when he finished, I picked it up and read it. And was smitten.
The first time I read "Owen Meany," I loved it because it was hilarious.
The second time I read "Owen Meany," I loved it because it let me know in a keen way that faith and doubt, that sacredness and profanity, often coexist.
The third time I read "Owen Meany," I closed the book, then handed it to the barista in the coffee shop where I was sitting and urged her to read it.
The fourth time I read "Owen Meany," the rage over 1980s politics seemed a bit dated — but I saw more of myself in the middle-aged narrator's disillusionment.
Will there be a fifth time? I don't know. Some books accompany you all the way through life, though. "Owen," for me, is one of them.
