Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving
John Irving’s, who is author of “The World According to Garp” and “The Cider House Rules”, recent novel Last Night in Twisted River is frequently as turbulent as the river that supplies its name. It involves dog fights, drowning, shotgun blasts, lethal car accidents, severed limbs, babies in danger, and the risk of bear attacks.
Last Night in Twisted River is a going from the atrocious turns of his first novels. Irving has always intentionally displayed his style on his literary heroes, Dickens and George Eliot, but now seems almost to enter their creative outlooks, too. In spite of numerous similarities to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire, Last Night in Twisted River is ultimately rather quieter than those books. The story is turbulent, yes, but there are also lots of backwaters and spirals. Not that this will lower from the reader’s pleasure. After all, just since a executing bear is blinking at you does not mean that his tricks have lost their charms.
Last Night in Twisted River begins in 1954, in northern New Hampshire’s Coos County, where the drowning of a young Canadian boy in a log-filled river serves as a forerunner of more distress for widowed camp cook Dominic Baciagalupo and his 12-year-old son, Daniel. Dominic is having an affair with the local constable’s girlfriend, and one night Danny inaccuracies her for a running wild bear and accidentally kills her. Worrying wrath from the brutal lawman, the father and son are forced to run away, their backs watched by a hard-bitten logger named Ketchum.
Over the next fifteen years, Dominic and Danny travel throughout New England and Canada, settling for a time in various cities, keeping on their educations and careers. Dominic keeps on his employment as a cook and dives in love with the mother of the boy who drowned in the river. Danny becomes a writer, marries unwisely and raises a son of his own. However, no matter how comfy they get to be in any one place, the cook and his son can’t flee the long shadow of Constable Carl, who grows into only more dangerous as the years go by, against the watchful eye of Ketchum.
Irving concepts a subtle chronicle structure for “Last Night in Twisted River.” The novel’s six sections each leap forward in linear chronology, but the details about the intermediate years are left to be delivered in fits and starts. This photopatching strategy allows for multiple layers of uncertainty and paradox as Irving doles out his exposures about Danny, his father and Ketchum. It’s an imposing exploit of prolonged narrative artistry, suggestive of the tour de force “Walt Catches Cold” chapter and its aftermath in “The World According to Garp.”
The power severely builds over the half-century the book spreads. Each component of the tale and every era is directed with convincingly as Irving manages to portray well postwar America, the 1960s and Vietnam, the 1980s and the internet age, without detracting from the story or his careful construction of his characters’ respective psychologies.
The novel is about expulsion, both verbatim and emotional, whereby free-thinking Americans, who reject to join in the loud-mouthed cheerleading are always, in some way, on the run from those maligant forces. Last Night in Twisted River is a novel of excellence. This bountiful, brilliantly written and wonderfully realized inter-generational story of a father and son on the lam, and their faulty protector, remains likeness with the very best of Irving’s previous work.
In the acknowledgements of his 12th novel John Irving says that he read the whole thing aloud to his wife and son. This act alone is impressive — Irving has not become one of America’s most famous writers by writing small. He writes big books, huge ones, typically with enough story and more to cover a single hero’s strange lifetime.
The boy’s name is Danny Baciagalupo — he wisely changes it to Danny Angel for much of his writing career — and a reader could be forgiven for suspecting that the character is a proxy for the author. Irving was born in 1942; Danny, the future novelist, is 12 years old when the story begins in 1954. Do the math. Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving, 20 years in the making, is his most autobiographical yet, says Stephanie Merritt (The Observer)
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