Procrastination is the first novel by T. S. Garp, a serious, historically researched work whose publication established him as a striking young writer without making him a popular one. Its bleak fable of delayed resistance and failed liberation was received through competing frames: as an ambitious literary debut, as a story about bears, and as the work of Jenny Fields’s famous son. For Garp, the reception made the distance between a book’s artistic life and its public identity impossible to ignore.

Composition and Story

Garp joked that he named the novel Procrastination because it had taken him so long to write, but the work had in fact been written steadily and carefully. He was rarely a procrastinator. The novel was described as historical and set in Vienna from 1938 to 1945, continuing through the period of Russian occupation. Its young anarchist protagonist waits for the right opportunity to strike against the Nazis after the Anschluss, but waits too long: he is too young to understand the danger as it unfolds and cannot be certain what to do. His widowed mother, meanwhile, protects her private life, remains unconcerned with politics, and hoards her dead husband’s money.

During the war, the anarchist works as a zookeeper at Schönbrunn Zoo. As Vienna starves and people raid the zoo for food, he frees the remaining animals, which are innocent of their country’s political inaction. But they are starving too, and eat him. The novel calls this only natural. A starving mob then easily slaughters the animals while roaming Vienna ahead of the Russian forces; that outcome, too, is presented as only natural. The repeated fatalism turns liberation into another stage of the catastrophe: delayed resistance cannot undo what has already happened, and good intentions do not alter the material conditions of hunger.

After her son’s death, the mother tries to awaken the complacent city by imitating his gesture and releasing the zoo animals. The circumstances have changed: now they are well fed, few leave their cages, and those that do are contained along the paths and gardens before being returned unharmed. An elderly bear suffers violent diarrhea. The mother’s attempt at liberation is well meant but meaningless and unrealized. Arrested, she is examined by a police doctor, who discovers that she has cancer and is terminally ill. Her hoarded wealth finally serves her: she dies in luxury at Vienna’s only private hospital, the Rudolfinerhaus.

In a death dream, the mother imagines two young Asiatic black bears escaping, surviving, and multiplying until they become a famous new species in the Danube valley. The novel marks this as her imagination, not an event in the story’s material world. After her death, it ends instead with the diarrhetic bear dying in Schönbrunn Zoo. That deliberately deflationary ending lends the novel’s revolutionary hopes no consoling afterlife: the imagined future of flourishing bears yields to the death of an actual animal.

Debut and Critical Reception

The novel’s historical research was praised, though Garp had little interest in that aspect of its reputation. Critics also cited its originality and unusual scope for a first novel by so young an author. John Wolf, Garp’s publisher, had agreed with him not to advertise on the jacket flap that this was the first novel by Jenny Fields’s son. Nonetheless, few reviewers avoided mentioning Garp’s relation to his mother. One praised the famous feminist’s son for becoming what he had said he wanted to be when he grew up. To Garp, such remarks diverted attention from the book’s faults and merits; Wolf countered that readers were often more interested in the writer’s identity than in what he had written.

The reviews could also reduce the novel to its recurring animal imagery. One wit, having dug up Garp’s earlier Grillparzer story from an obscure publication, chided him for still writing about bears and suggested he might write about people when he grew up. Yet the debut was more astonishing and more noticed than most. It was never a popular book and did not turn Garp into a household name like his mother. Wolf’s judgment was that it was not that kind of book and Garp was not that kind of writer.

Wolf urged Garp to distinguish serious publication from commercial success. If he wanted to be rich and famous, Wolf wrote, he should choose another line of work; if he was serious about writing, he should not complain that a serious book had been published seriously. Garp was only twenty-four, Wolf reminded him, and would write more books. The advice acknowledged both the real achievement and the limits of the debut: its publication was a beginning, not a promise of wealth or fame.

Artistic Reputation and Public Identity

The publicity problem had begun even before the novel appeared. Nearly fifteen years earlier, when Garp’s Grillparzer story had been submitted to a magazine favored by Mr. Tinch, its editor dismissed it as only mildly interesting. After Garp’s third novel came out, that same editor wrote a flattering letter inviting new work. Garp retrieved the old rejection note, still crusted with coffee stains and torn at its repeatedly folded creases, and enclosed it with a reply that turned the editor’s old assessment back on the magazine. The episode shows how long Garp retained a slight and how sharply he resisted retrospective praise that ignored its earlier rejection.

A more consequential version of the same conflict followed Procrastination’s reception. Although Garp had earned some money and Helen now had a salary, he remained dissatisfied. He no longer needed Jenny’s financial help, though he felt able to accept money she freely gave. Wolf’s account of the book’s reception did not resolve Garp’s unease, but the debut marked a change in his circumstances: it had earned him an independent place as a published writer, if not the popular recognition he resented seeing attached to his mother instead.

The novel’s afterlife also demonstrated how easily readers could treat fiction as evidence about its author. A later university course paired Jenny’s autobiography with Garp’s three novels and Stewart Percy’s A History of Everett Steering’s Academy, inviting students to search the books for details that appeared to be true and thereby reconstruct Garp’s life. That method directly contradicted the separation between a novel’s artistic design and the biographical facts readers hoped to extract from it. Garp never knew about the course, but its existence extended the same pattern that had marked his debut: the public’s curiosity about the person threatened to displace attention to the work.

Consequences and Significance

Procrastination did not make Garp a household product, nor was it a popular book. Its importance lies instead in the combination of an unusually ambitious first novel and a reception that made his family identity part of its public meaning. Reviewers praised the research and originality while repeatedly invoking Jenny; other commentators seized on the bears as a shorthand for his subject. These judgments did not simply describe the book. They exposed the competing expectations brought to it and the difficulty of making the work legible apart from its author’s biography.

The novel’s ending and its publication history sharpen that contrast. Within the fiction, the mother’s imagined bears suggest a future beyond immediate defeat, but the last concrete event is the death of the bear in the zoo. Outside the fiction, the book began Garp’s literary career without delivering commercial triumph. Its serious publication gave him reason to continue, as Wolf recognized, while leaving intact his anger at being read through Jenny Fields or reduced to a familiar motif. Procrastination thus matters both as Garp’s first sustained artistic statement and as the first clear instance of the public struggle over how that art would be understood.