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.
