Garp heard from his mother that the first reviews were “not nice,” but Jenny—on John Wolf's advice—did not enclose any reviews with her letter. John Wolf clipped the first rave from among the important New York reviews: “The women's movement has at last exhibited a significant influence on a significant male writer,” wrote the reviewer, who was an associate professor of women's studies somewhere. She went on to say that The World According to Bensenhaver was “the first in-depth study, by a man, of the peculiarly male neurotic pressure many women are made to suffer.” And so forth.
“Christ,” Garp said, “it sounds as if I wrote a thesis. It's a fucking novel, it's a story, and I made it up!”
“Well, it sounds as if she liked it,” Helen said.
“It's not it she liked,” Garp said. “She liked something else.”
But the review helped to establish the rumor that The World According to Bensenhaver was “a feminist novel.”
“Like me,” Jenny Fields wrote her son, “it appears you are going to be the beneficiary of one of the many popular misunderstandings of our time.”
Other reviews called the book “paranoid, crazed, and crammed with gratuitous violence and sex.” Garp was not shown most of those reviews, but they probably didn't hurt the sales, either.
One reviewer admitted that Garp was a serious writer whose “tendencies toward baroque exaggeration have run amuck.” John Wolf couldn't resist sending Garp that review—probably because John Wolf agreed with it.
Jenny wrote that she was becoming “involved with” New Hampshire politics.
“The New Hampshire gubernatorial race is taking all our time,” Roberta Muldoon wrote.
“How could anyone give all her time to a New Hampshire governor?” Garp wrote back.
There was, apparently, some feminist issue at stake, and some generally illiberal nonsense and crimes the incumbent governor was actually proud of. The administration boasted that a raped fourteen-year-old had been denied an abortion, thus stemming the tide of nationwide degeneracy. The governor truly was a crowing, reactionary moron. Among other things, he appeared to believe that poor people should not be helped by the state or federal government, largely because the condition of the poor seemed to the governor of New Hampshire to be a deserved punishment—the just and moral judgment of a Superior Being. The incumbent governor was obnoxious and clever; for example, the sense of fear that he successfully evoked: that New Hampshire was in danger of being victimized by teams of New York divorcees.
The divorced women from New York allegedly were moving into New Hampshire in droves. Their intentions were to turn New Hampshire women into lesbians, or at the very least to encourage them to be unfaithful to their New Hampshire husbands; their intentions also included the seduction of New Hampshire husbands, and New Hampshire high school boys. The New York divorcees apparently represented widespread promiscuity, socialism, alimony, and something ominously referred to, in the New Hampshire press, as “Group Female Living.”
One of the centers for this alleged Group Female Living was Dog's Head Harbor, of course, “the den of the radical feminist Jenny Fields.”
There had also been a widespread increase, the governor said, of venereal disease—"a known problem among these Liberationists.” He was a terrific liar. The candidate running for governor against this well-liked fool was, apparently, a woman. Jenny and Roberta and (Jenny wrote) “teams of New York divorcees” were running her campaign.
Somehow, in the sole New Hampshire newspaper of statewide distribution, Garp's “degenerate” novel was referred to as “the new feminist Bible.”
“A violent hymn to the moral depravity and sexual danger of our time,” wrote one West Coast reviewer.
“A pained protest against the violence and sexual combat of our groping age,” said another newspaper, somewhere else.
Whether it was liked or disliked, the novel was largely looked upon as news. One way for novels to be successful is for the fiction to resemble somebody's version of the news. That is what happened to The World According to Bensenhaver; like the stupid governor of New Hampshire, Garp's book became news.
“New Hampshire is a backwoods state with base politics,” Garp wrote his mother. “For God's sake, don't get involved.”
“That's what you always say,” Jenny wrote. “When you come home, you're going to be famous. Then let me see you try not to get involved.”
“Just watch me,” Garp wrote her. “Nothing could be easier.”
His involvement with the transatlantic mail had momentarily distracted Garp from his sense of the awesome and lethal Under Toad, but now Helen told him that she detected the presence of the beast, too. “Let's go home,” she said. “We've had a nice time.”
They got a telegram from John Wolf. “Stay where you are,” it said. “People are buying your book in droves.”
Roberta sent Garp a T-shirt.
NEW YORK DIVORCEES ARE GOOD
FOR NEW HAMPSHIRE
the T-shirt said.
“My God,” Garp said to Helen. “If we're going home, let's at least wait until after this mindless election.”
Thus he missed, thankfully, the “dissenting feminist opinion” of The World According to Bensenhaver, published in a giddy, popular magazine. The novel, the reviewer said, “steadfastly upholds the sexist notion that women are chiefly an assemblage of orifices and the acceptable prey of predatory males.... T. S. Garp continues the infuriating male mythology: the good man is the bodyguard of his family, the good woman never willingly lets another man enter her literal or figurative door.”
Even Jenny Fields was cajoled into “reviewing” her son's novel, and it is fortunate that Garp never saw this, either. Jenny said that although it was her son's best novel—because it was his most serious subject—it was a novel “marred by repeated male obsessions, which could become tedious to women readers.” However, Jenny said, her son was a good writer who was still young and would only get better. “His heart,” she added, “is in the right place.”
If Garp had read that, he might have stayed in Vienna a lot longer. But they made their plans to leave. As usual, anxiousness quickened the Garps' plans. One night Duncan was not home from the park before dark and Garp, running out to look for him, called back to Helen that this was the final sign; they would leave as soon as possible. City life, in general, made Garp too fearful for Duncan.
Garp ran along the Prinz-Eugen-Strasse toward the Russian War Memorial at the Schwarzenbergplatz. There was a pastry shop near there, and Duncan liked pastry, although Garp had repeatedly warned the child that it would ruin his supper. “Duncan!” he ran calling, and his voice against the stolid stone buildings bounced back to him like the froggy belching of the Under Toad, the foul and warty beast whose sticky nearness he felt like breath.
But Duncan was munching happily on a Grillparzertorte in the pastry shop.
“It gets dark earlier and earlier,” he complained. “I'm not that late.”
Garp had to admit it. They walked home together. The Under Toad disappeared up a small, dark street—or else it's not interested in Duncan, Garp thought. He imagined he felt the tug of the tide at his own ankles, but it was a passing feeling.
The telephone, that old cry of alarm—a warrior stabbed on guard duty, screaming his shock—startled the pension where they lived and brought the trembling landlady like a ghost to their rooms.