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Reading A Prayer for Owen Meany means spending time in a swirling conglomeration of quirky characters and unexpected twists of fate. Starting with the title character, an abnormally small boy with an abnormally high voice, most of the people who inhabit John Irving’s fictional town of Gravesend, New Hampshire, have some aspect of their lives that would be considered odd.

Johnny Wheelwright, the novel’s narrator, lives with his mother and grandmother in a grand old house that also shelters Lydia (a previous maid who can no longer serve the family because a cancer caused her leg to be amputated) and two other maids—one to do the housework and one to take care of Lydia. Johnny’s mother, Tabitha, takes the Boston & Maine train to Boston once a week to stay overnight so she can attend her voice lesson in the morning. On one of the trips to Boston, she meets a man with whom she has “a little fling,” or so she tells Johnny, who is supposedly the result of that fling. But to Johnny’s constant disappointment, she never tells him who his father is.

Perhaps she would have told him when he got older, but she dies in 1953 when he’s only eleven years old. At a little league baseball game, Owen Meany, who’s not a good player, swings the bat and makes unexpected contact with the ball, sending it soaring toward the stands, where it strikes Johnny’s mother in the temple and kills her. Despite the fact that Owen killed his mother, Johnny continues to be friends with him. Johnny says the death was an accident, but Owen explains it by declaring himself God’s instrument. “God has taken your mother,” he says “My hands were the instrument.”

And thus begins Owen’s lifelong understanding of his role in the world. At one point, he assures Johnny that eventually God will tell him who his father is. And indeed, Johnny learns his father’s identity, but Owen is the one who leads him to it. While playing the ghost of Christmas future in a community theater production of “A Christmas Carol,” Owen foresees the date of his own death, and when he grows older, dreams what he thinks will be the exact circumstances of his death. Despite his personal relationship with God, Owen has a mysterious vendetta against the Catholic Church, which drives him to attend the Episcopal Church where Johnny and his mother worship.

In addition to his strong convictions about his life, Owen develops convictions about what is happening in the rest of the world, particularly the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. While he works hard to get himself sent to Vietnam as a soldier, he employs a radical strategy to keep Johnny out.

For Johnny, life is not nearly as certain as it appears to be for Owen. Yet he believes Owen’s declaration about being God’s instrument. Johnny believes everything Owen does is done for a reason, and he supports his friend in everything, even the tedious repetition of a basketball shot that Owen is obsessed with. To execute the shot, Johnny passes the ball to Owen and then lifts him toward the basket, enabling Owen to dunk the ball into the net. The point of the endless practicing is to shave seconds off the time it takes to complete the maneuver. And the day comes when those seconds matter.

Although Owen Meany’s name is in the title, A Prayer for Owen Meany is really about Johnny Wheelwright and the way his friend affects his life. Johnny says in the novel’s opening sentence that he is doomed to remember Owen Meany, not for the obvious reasons, but because Owen is the reason he believes in God. If Johnny had been a different person, Owen could have had the opposite effect.

Accompanying Johnny through the unexpected happenings that bring him to this conclusion kept me eagerly turning pages in this very long book. I love the characters, odd as they may be. I love their eccentric approaches to life and the subsequent unconventional events that occur. But all of these would mean little without the unfloundering faith of Owen Meany. And Johnny’s unwavering love for Owen. Therein lie the depth and meaning of A Prayer for Owen Meany, a book I’ll never forget.