Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving
The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon
John Irving’s new novel is often as turbulent as the river that provides its name. It contains dog fights, drownings, shotgun blasts, fatal car wrecks, severed limbs, babies in peril, and, as with many other Irving novels, the threat of bear attacks. In one memorable scene, a naked skydiver plummets into a pigsty. Although it never quite achieves the narrative frenzy that made Irving famous in The World According to Garp, his fans will not be disappointed, especially when stacking the book against its anaemic competition. The story opens in a New Hampshire logging camp in 1954, where a widower named Dominic Baciagalupo works as a cook. He is assisted by his fragile, dreamy 12-year-old son, Daniel. Their hard lives are made all the more difficult when Daniel inadvertently kills a member of their tightly knit community, a tragic mistake that sends father and son into a five-decade exile. Boston, Vermont, Iowa, Colorado and Canada all provide way stations as they flee the insane local deputy sheriff who has vowed revenge on them for the incident. Along the way, Dominic changes his name and becomes a successful restaurateur, while his son also adopts a new identity to become a famous novelist, whose output is not dissimilar to that of one John Irving.
Last Night in Twisted River is at its best in its depiction of the long, meandering course a life can take. “As for the river, it just kept moving, as rivers do — as rivers do,” Irving writes, though he might just as easily be talking about his protagonists as any body of water. Few other writers labour as tirelessly to construct complete human beings on the page. From the big geopolitical issues of the day to the feel of an Indian woman’s unfurled braid, Irving strives to include just about everything that goes into creating a consciousness. As usual, there are also plenty of comically violent set pieces, most notably the assassination of a dangerous dog and a square dance held on an ice-covered river. There is even a cameo by a sagacious Kurt Vonnegut. Most novels are too expensive these days; you just happen not to feel quite so profligate when consuming Irving. This generosity is most apparent with Daniel, yet another Irving hero who occupies that fertile territory between the author’s autobiography and his unbridled imagination. Daniel’s novels might closely resemble Irving’s (including one about abortion that is made into an Oscar-winning movie that sounds a lot like The Cider House Rules), but he is also very much his own man, one who seems to attract tragedy like an uncovered honey pot draws flies.
Lesser characters also leap from the page, such as Lady Sky, that naked parachutist, and Aunt Filomena, the apparently mousy spinster who provides a teenage Daniel with his sexual education. Irving proves rather less successful with a crusty old logger named Ketchum, who, perhaps not coincidentally, shares the name of the Idaho village where Hemingway killed himself. With Ketchum, Irving’s glorious excesses become simply excessive, bringing to mind not so much a believable character as a character actor trying to be colourful. As in previous books such as Garp and A Widow for One Year, Irving also meditates on the art of fiction throughout the narrative, though there is now a playfulness to this authorial self-consciousness.
At one point, Ketchum criticises Danny for an over-reliance on semi-colons, saying “they look like someone smashed a fly over the comma”. This causes the reader to notice the absence of this form of punctuation from the text, but also to wonder what Ketchum might think of all Irving’s dashes. Elsewhere, Irving seems to poke fun at his own tendency to long-windedness when he notes how Dominic detects “a kind of logorrhoea had possessed his son” in the middle part of his career.
Despite numerous similarities to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire, Last Night in Twisted River is ultimately somewhat calmer than those books. The story is turbulent, yes, but there are also plenty of backwaters and eddies. Perhaps the author’s jacket photo provides a clue to the change. There is gray hair showing in his prose as well as on his pate, and the wise twinkle in those once pugnacious eyes also permeates his storytelling. Not that this will detract from the reader’s pleasure. After all, just because a performing bear is winking at you does not mean that his tricks have lost their charms.
Spooner, by Pete Dexter, Globe and Mail, Oct 15, 2009
October 16, 2009
The Daily Review, Thursday, Oct. 15
Dunce Moves Pete Dexter
Pete Dexter’s latest novel follows the ill-advised antics of a man not gifted with a strong intellect who manages to thrive nonetheless
Warren Spooner, the eponymous hero of Pete Dexter’s richly comic new novel, is a very naughty boy. Raised in Kennedy-era Georgia, he manages to get himself kicked out of kindergarten for sprouting a precocious erection every time he draws close to his pretty young teacher. Soon after his expulsion, he begins to terrorize his sleepy town by sneaking into neighbors’ houses at night and urinating into the shoes of unsuspecting owners. And then there’s the incident where he plants himself on a teeming colony of fire ants, just to see how it feels. People around him can be forgiven for suspecting nothing good will come of the boy.
But Spooner discovers in his teens that he has a gift for something other than sociopathic mayhem – he can throw a baseball. He is drafted into the big leagues, only to have his elbow disintegrate before he can strike it rich. After a few shiftless years in door-to-door sales and a busted marriage in Florida, he winds up in Philadelphia, where an auspicious combination of talent and incompetence lands him a job as a tabloid columnist. He also starts writing novels that share plots and even titles with the early work of one Pete Dexter, who also worked for a spell as a newspaper columnist in Philadelphia. The novel ends with Spooner living on an island in Washington State, where he proves himself singularly unwilling to go gentle into that good night. And that’s about it. Unlike the best of Dexter’s earlier novels, Brotherly Love, The Paperboy and the National Book Award-winning Paris Trout, Spooner relies more on tone and character than a surging plot to work its magic.
With Warren Spooner, Dexter has just the hero to carry this load. Anarchic, stubborn, befuddled and shrewd, he wins over the reader from the moment he is born. Although each of his siblings proves to be intellectually gifted, Spooner is deemed a dunce by most everyone, including himself. “He had a certain curiosity about how that might feel, to be intelligent, but didn’t dwell on it when it didn’t come.” Women seem particularly down on him, notably his first wife, Honey, who, “like so many women of Spooner’s acquaintance … looked at him one day and seemed to come all at once to her senses. It was always the same, like they’d wandered into a pet store and almost bought a monkey.” And yet Spooner somehow manages to thrive, perhaps because he lives in a world where so many smart people seem intent on cornering the market in stupidity.
Dexter structures his story upon a series of deftly drawn set pieces. One of the best involves a high-school football coach named Evelyn Tinker, a man who manages to combine pig ignorance and boundless self-confidence in such a perfect balance that it’s a wonder he is not a Republican congressman. Like so many coaches, he’s fond of exhorting his players to give more than 100 per cent, and sticks stubbornly to his guns when challenged by a pie-chart-drawing geometry teacher. “What I’m trying to instill in these individuals is to want a bigger pie,” the coach explains, “which the only way to get it is to give a hundred and twenty per cent.”
Equally captivating is Harry Faint, a heavyweight boxer with an unfortunate name whose main pugilistic skill is the ability to take a punch. He endures such a pounding after his arrival in Philadelphia from the wilds in Texas that “it is possible that in the history of the democracy no citizen has ever had his nose broken by so many different people in one week.” Spooner meets him, in all places, at a literary luncheon honouring Margaret Truman, the daughter of the former president whose attempt at novel writing proves as inept as her earlier career as an opera singer. “The sentences rolled out of Mrs. Truman, bloodless and arthritic, one after another, more dangling fancies stuck to the ends than a French tickler.”
It is Harry who accompanies Spooner on his most perilous adventure, an ill-advised but altogether characteristic trek to a South Philadelphia bar to confront the enraged family of a small-time drug dealer Spooner insulted in his column. Spooner barely survives the ensuing riot, though any notion that he has learned his lesson is put to rest in the novel’s final chapters, as he once again enters combat, this time with an obnoxious neighbour. Their prolonged battle, both funny and menacing, is a perfect finale for this fine novel, proving that, although Spooner may be getting old, when it comes to riling people up he is still willing to give it 120 per cent.
Beginners by Raymond Carver, Sunday Times, Oct 4, 2009
October 4, 2009
Beginners by Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver, Syracuse, New York. (1984)
(Bob Adelman)
In the summer of 1980, after reading the edited manuscript of his second collection, the great American short-story writer Raymond Carver sent a pained letter to his editor, Gordon Lish. Although Lish, while working at Esquire magazine, had made Carver’s name by publishing much of his early work, the author was stunned to discover that his friend, now a book editor at Knopf, had cut his manuscript by more than 50%. A recovering alcoholic, Carver begged Lish to scrap the project, claiming that his “very sanity [was] on the line” if publication were to proceed.
Lish would not budge. The resulting book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, was published with his drastic edits. Carver did not lose his sanity, however. Instead, he became famous, earning an ecstatic front-page review from the New York Times Book Review, and freedom from a hardscrabble life. But the damage had been done to their relationship. In the years leading up to Carver’s premature death from lung cancer in 1988, Lish would have no influence on the career he had helped fashion.
Recent revelations about the extent of Lish’s editing have threatened to damage Carver’s reputation as the most important short-story writer of the past 30 years, his matter-of-fact style influencing auth- ors as diverse as Tobias Wolff and Jay McInerney. As with William Golding and Charles Monteith, or F Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins, the apparent disclosure of a deeply collaborative relationship between author and editor challenged the whole notion of great writing being the result of lonely genius. Now, editors William L Stull and Maureen P Carroll, working with the blessing of Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, have attempted to set the record straight, “restoring” the original manuscript from beneath the thick canopy of Lish’s pen and publishing it under the title of Beg-inners. The goal is to establish that Carver was the victim of editorial meddling who would have soared higher even sooner if not for Lish.
The truth, however, is somewhat more complicated than the simple tale of a Svengalian editor taking advantage of a brittle author. In contrasting the Beginners manuscript with the published volume, it grows clear that Lish often had good reason to wield his red biro. Several of the 17 stories Carver submitted for publication benefit from radical reduction. The story Carver called Want to See Something? (but Lish published as I Could See the Smallest Things) is a cumbersome piece whose memorable image of poisoned slugs is diminished by the inclusion of a subplot involving an albino child. Lish rightly excised this ham-fisted ana-logy, and the story came into its own.
Similarly, Pie, which Lish renamed A Serious Talk, ends with a spasm of marital violence that feels at odds with the comic mayhem wreaked earlier by its alcoholic narrator. Lish changes the ending to include a petty theft that perfectly encapsulates the story’s dramatic trajectory. To his credit, even Carver admitted that the edit was “inspired and wonderful”.
Despite these improvements, Lish’s editorial bravado often does cross the line into a disquieting infringement. In two of the stories, Lish changes the names of several characters to no obvious effect. Perhaps he thought that transforming Kate into Melody would better evoke a working-class milieu, though there is a real arrogance in anyone telling America’s premier dirty realist how babies are named in the nation’s trailer parks. In Gazebo, Lish whimsically changes a hotel room number from 22 to 11, as if a 50% reduction will somehow defray printing costs. Elsewhere in the story, he adds the phrase “with a stick” to Carver’s “You couldn’t beat it”, an addition that would tempt many writers to set about their editors with a similar implement.
In the story The Fling, whose title Lish unwisely changes to Sacks, a smug narrator uses the word “sordid” to describe his father’s confession of marital infidelity. Lish cuts this in the edited manuscript, a seemingly small change that nevertheless sets the tone for his later demolition of the story’s emotional foundation. And in the story that was to give the title to both collections, Lish almost completely removes an important subplot involving an old couple, thereby depriving the writing of its emotional resonance.
All of which leaves the question of why Lish did it. The answer appears to be literary taste. Lish, while an editor at Esquire, was one of the great champions of the laconic, unsentimental “minimalist” style that was to dominate the American short story in the 1970s. From Carver’s first significant publication (by Lish) in 1971, the author was the foremost practitioner of this brutalism, seen to stunning effect in his first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976). By the time Carver submitted his second collection, however, he was breaking out of minimalism’s constraints to work in a richer, more emotive manner. Lish’s edits were simply the efforts of the master trying to keep the prize student from leaving the fold. Carver’s two subsequent collections, Cathedral (1983) and Elephant (1988), were both produced without any editorial help at all. They contain his best work, and prove beyond a doubt that his genius was very much his own. Lish may have helped put Carver on the map of the American short story, but the writer made himself its capital city.
Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in A Small, Good Thing, one of the stories in Beginners that Carver was to “restore” in his lifetime. Carver’s original tale of the unexpected communion between an aggrieved young couple and a lonely baker is a perfectly executed work of almost unbearable feeling and insight. But Lish, editing ferociously, cut it by almost 80%, creating The Bath, a fragmentary piece that contains none of its source’s emotional power. The result might be a shining example of literary minimalism, but it is not what we want to read about when we read Raymond Carver.
Beginners by Raymond Carver
Cape £16.99 pp224
The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin
Orange Prize-winning author Valerie Martin from New York State, USA.
At the start of Orange prize-winner Valerie Martin’s engrossing new novel, the ambitious actor who narrates it has his life saved by another man. While holidaying with some fellow thespians, 22-year-old Edward Day finds himself all at sea after falling from a pier during a night-time stroll. In danger of drowning, he is saved at the last minute by Guy Margate, a moody, mysterious actor who bears an ominous resemblance to Edward. Although apparently a blessing, the rescue turns into a curse on both their lives.
Their relationship almost immediately takes a sinister turn. Guy asks Edward for a substantial loan, then starts to hit on his new girlfriend, the beautiful but emotionally brittle Madeleine. Edward’s increasingly urgent desire to get away from Guy is tempered by a strong sense of obligation. “If he had not jumped in to save me,” he confesses, “I would have drowned. I couldn’t deny it; I owed him my life and my obligation was a bond that must endure between us forever.”
Martin follows this tortuous relationship over the next few years as the two men try to ascend the greasy pole of their profession in 1970s New York. Guy is first to get the upper hand, landing a choice part in a new play in which he gets to parade his choicest part during a full-frontal nude scene. His performance wins him the twin holy grails of a young actor’s life: an Equity card and an agent. Edward, meanwhile, founders in a play about criminal activity in a bakery. The reviews are scathing, including one that calls him “a mincing, predatory fop”. Off stage, the two men continue to duel over Madeleine, who is notably less contemptuous of Guy’s nude strut than Edward.
The tables are slowly turned, however, when Edward begins to land the good roles just as Guy’s career founders. Their rivalry over Madeleine also undergoes an important shift during a summer Edward spends performing at a festival in rural Connecticut. Relations among this desperately intimate threesome explode when Edward and Madeleine are cast together in a big production of Uncle Vanya, while an unemployed and increasingly volatile Guy is left to stew in the wings.
The best thing about Martin’s novel is its portrait of the life of an actor. Callbacks, table-waiting jobs, endless classes and petty jealousies are detailed with wry accuracy. There is a wonderful evocation of the hell of summer stock, where ambitious young actors are consigned to performing, “night after night, to audiences of 40 or 50 who looked on like lost children in the wilderness of empty seats. Their applause sounded like dried peas rattling in a tin can”.
Martin’s ease with the world of the theatre allows her to have a fine old time with characters such as Teddy Winterbottom, the scion of a rich family who thinks he’s had an artistic breakthrough when he ditches his pretty fiancée for a creepy Greenwich Village artist named Wayne. Madeleine is also a powerful creation, as flighty as the Chekhov characters she excels at playing. And Guy’s brooding Brandoesque confidence conceals a soul that is surprisingly feeble.
Martin has set herself a harder task with her hero. Since the novel is his confession, Edward is the one character the author cannot hide behind an elaborate mask. We see right into his soul, and it is not a pretty sight, fractured as it is at an early age by the suicide of a narcissistic mother. From that moment on, Edward navigates through his turbulent life using his own self-interest as a north star, including one supremely selfish moment when his only response to a tragedy that befalls someone close to him is to worry about its effect on his performance at the following day’s matinee. It is a testament to the author’s skill that Edward’s shortcomings only serve to make the book more enjoyable. He may be a monster, but if the theatre teaches us nothing else, it is that monsters are often the characters who get the biggest applause.
