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"Last
Night in
Twisted River
" by
John Irving
; Random (553 pages,
$28
)
———
The bear
makes its first appearance on Page 28. Because we're in
a
John Irving
novel, tragedy is practically guaranteed to follow.
"It was an accident," a character declares
after the unfortunate death that triggers the plot of
"Last Night in
Twisted River
." "It's nobody's fault."
Like so
much of Irving's work, "Last Night in
Twisted River
" unfolds in "a world of accidents" and
coincidences and random bad luck, beginning with the
first sentence and the soon-to-be-fallen
Angel Pope
: "The young Canadian, who could not have been more
than fifteen, had hesitated too long." And everyone
must share the burden of those misfortunes — and learn
to accept grief and mourning as life's permanent
counterbalances to joy.
The
temptation to label "Last Night in
Twisted River
" as a return to form is considerable, especially
in the wake of Irving's previous two books, the
underwhelming "The Fourth Hand" and the
bloated, exasperating "Until I Find You." The
new story abounds with melancholic humor and comic
absurdity, and its themes amount to a greatest-hits
recap of his 11 previous novels.
But
Irving is bent on more than just giving readers what
they want. Spanning five decades, "Last Night"
begins, somewhat fitfully, in 1954 in a fly-speck
logging settlement in
New Hampshire
where a widowed cook, Dominic Baciagalupo, and his
12-year-old son Danny prepare meals for the rough-hewn
men who work and live there.
Irving,
who has always been fond of exploring specific processes
and professions, delves deeply into the mechanics of the
dangerous logging industry. The details don't always
make for riveting reading: "Before the advent of
mechanical loaders, the logs were unloaded by releasing
trip bunks on the sides of the trucks — this allowed
an entire load to roll off a truck at once."
Nonetheless,
the characters gradually start to take root: The
overprotective Dominic, always with watchful eye trained
on his son; his old friend Ketchum, a bear of a man who
was also close to Dominic's late wife, and Injun Jane, a
large woman with "a ton of coal-black hair"
perpetually topped by a Cleveland Indians cap.
Jane, one
of the few indelible women in a book populated primarily
by men, works as a dishwasher at the camp, has been
Danny's baby sitter since he was 2 and shares a
relationship with Dominic that's a lot more intimate
than that of a mere co-worker. With Ketchum, she will be
a life-changing influence on Danny in ways not initially
apparent.
Beginning
with a jump to
Boston
in 1967, "Last Night in
Twisted River
" becomes a story of the fugitive Dominic and
Danny, who repeatedly change identity and uproot their
lives over the next 40 years, on the run from a
murderous cop with an implacable thirst for vengeance.
Despite
its thriller trappings — and the often outlandish
adventures the characters endure — "Last Night in
Twisted River
" ultimately becomes Irving's most personal and
revealing exploration of the writing process. While
still a boy, Danny discovers that "all writers must
know how to distance themselves, to detach themselves
from this and that emotional moment," so they can
later recreate and reflect on it through their fiction.
Like Irving, Danny attends the
Iowa Writers Workshop
, where one of his teachers is Kurt Vonnegut.
Also like
Irving, Danny is overly fond of semicolons and becomes a
bestselling author, even writing a novel (like Irving's
"The Cider House Rules") about abortion. At
times he reaches conclusions that are not-so-subtly
aimed at critics of Irving's style of storytelling
("He was too young to know that, in any novel with
a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no
coincidences").
"Last
Night in
Twisted River
" can't be considered an outright autobiographical
novel: Surely Irving never had to deal with a seemingly
evil blue Ford Mustang as a harbinger of death or
encountered a nude skydiver parachuting into a pig pen.
But this agile, sometimes tricky novel is the closest he
has come to meta-fiction, with sudden shifts in points
of view that give new meaning to the passage you have
just read and leaps in chronology that keep crucial
incidents offstage.
There are
even times when Irving directly addresses those who
psychoanalyze his work and pore over his novels for
insights into him. "In the media, real life was
more important than fiction; those elements of a novel
that were, at least, based on personal experience were
of more interest to the general public than those pieces
of the novel-writing process that were 'merely' made
up."
Irving's
commentary on the creative process might have been
better served in a nonfiction essay, though. The chief
— and considerable — pleasure of "Last Night in
Twisted River
" is its unwavering focus on the affecting bond
between father and son, which is relatively new
territory for Irving, and the suspenseful and eventful
journey of their lives.
And after
two disappointing books, Irving confirms that his knack
for creating humorously bizarre and excessive, but still
credible, characters remains intact. "Let me see if
I have this right," Danny asks the woman he marries
in the late 1960s. "You're not just an anti-war
activist and a sexual anarchist, you're also this
radical chick who specializes in serial babymaking for
draft dodgers — have I got that right?"
Yes, you
do. Welcome back, Mr. Irving.
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