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January 03, 2008
New Hampshire, Caucuses, and John Irving
All Christmas break I've been happily enjoying some pleasure reading. First on my list I picked up John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, and I'm sad to say I'm still working my way through it. The break has simply been too exciting and busy to devote as much time to reading as I'd like. So I've been spending the afternoon trying to get through some more of it as the spring semester looms in the near future. My mom happens to have the caucus coverage on TV, and I couldn't help but smile at the coincidence* of looking forward to the New Hampshire caucus while reading a novel set in that state by an author fairly obsessed with that place.
Owen Meany has turned out to be a timely read for me, as one of its major themes is religion, and different ways of approaching Christianity and religion in general both personally and denominationally. It's interesting to read a book with these themes keeping in mind it was published in 1989 and looks back to the 1950s and 60s. Another dimension to that is that I can't help but compare the novel's perspective to the struggles with faith I saw and experienced last year in college, living with a devout Christian and often seeing her aggressively faithful boyfriend, and my other roommate who's family has pulled her through a gamut of conservative denominations though she herself is a more mild-mannered personal-relationship-with-the-lord kind of gal.
The religious themes tie in to the election naturally, somewhat, with candidates like Huckabee and Romney in the race, and trends we've seen in the past eight years. What really inspired this post, however, is a little paragraph I ran across that seems to sum up our general national political landscape as well as the novel sums up a broad spectrum of religious styles.
It's a very pleasant synchronicity in reading a novel that portrays a broad spectrum of religious and political views through the characters populating a fictional New Hampshire town as when the New Hampshire caucus is supposed to be a preview of national primary trends.
*Of course, the novel repeatedly makes clear that Owen Meany himself does not believe in coincidences, so perhaps this afternoon and my pondering was preordained.
| By Spike | 04:52 PM
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