 "John Irving's finest novel in years" | 2009-11-03 |
| - Reviewed By User: A151OW029XD9JU |
I may as well come out and say it: I love John Irving. My love is unconditional. I will defend his lesser novels against all defamers. Happily, I will not be put in that position anytime soon, because Last Night in Twisted River is his strongest novel in years. It's a wonderful read!
I recently told a friend, "It's so good it hurts." Reflecting on what I had said, I realized I was right. Sometimes reading his books hurts. He populates his novels with sweet, sentimental, anxious men, and then he tortures them. Mr. Irving's signature blend of comedy and tragedy is again on display. Only in his world does an oft-repeated tale of whacking a bear on the nose with a frying pan lead to an accidental death.
The novel opens in rural New Hampshire in 1954. Widower Domenic Baciagalupo is the cook at a logging camp, where he is assisted by his 12-year-old son, Danny. It's a rough and tumble world, personified by the gruff and rugged logger, Ketchem, who becomes the closest thing to family that either Baciagalupo has. Last Night in Twisted River is an epic novel, spanning some 50 years. The aforementioned accidental death is the novel's catalyst. It causes Domenic and Danny to go on the run, sought for decades by a vigilante sheriff. But aside from being the tale of this truncated family's life in exile, this is a story about how you become the person you are.
Specifically, Mr. Irving is looking at how a writer becomes a writer, because that, indeed, is what Danny Baciagalupo becomes--a successful one, too. In fact, Danny Baciagalupo's career is... John Irving's career. There is no attempt to disguise the obviousness of the career trajectory, the subject matter of the books, the literary criticism--all are identical to Irving's. It seems clear that the author is having some fun with the self-referential material, but for fans like me, Irving gives us unusual insight into his process, and possibly some of his own attitudes on the life of a writer. Though, perhaps we can't assume that is so, as Danny has much to say about readers' assumptions about the autobiographical nature of fiction, and the value of what is borrowed versus what is imagined.
In a recent review, I commented on the way that Pat Conroy returns again and again to certain themes and plot elements in his fiction, but "jumbles them up in new and interesting ways." Certainly this is true, too, of Mr. Irving. In this novel we again find bears, writers, absent parents, endangered children, New England settings, prep schools, and so forth. It's easy to compare different aspects of this latest novel to what has come before. A dash of Garp and a soupçon of Owen Meany. But right from the start, the work of which this reminded me the most is The Cider House Rules. Not in subject matter, but in the period setting and the span of the story being told. And probably in the nature of the male relationships in this novel.
Last Night in Twisted River is a long, heart-wrenching story. You won't be racing through it. You may learn more about logging than you ever wanted to know. But Irving's language is magnificent and you won't soon forget these characters and their epic journey. This book is a must read for all fans of John Irving and of great literature. |
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| "Easily Irving's best work since THE CIDER HOUSE RULES and A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY" | 2009-11-02 |
| - Reviewed By editorial43 |
John Irving's 12th novel is a shaggy, shambling, lovable bear of a book. Inspired in part by Bob Dylan's song "Tangled Up in Blue," it is vintage Irving, stuffed to overflowing with a cast of memorable characters, dark humor, a surfeit of tragedy and loss, and enough love, sex and death to fill at least two or three less ambitious novels.
Spanning half a century beginning in 1954, LAST NIGHT IN TWISTED RIVER is the picaresque (and almost impossible to summarize) story of a cook, Dominic Baciagalupo, and his son Daniel, who flee a logging camp in northern New Hampshire the night 12-year-old Daniel accidentally kills his father's sometime lover with an eight-inch cast-iron skillet. The pair, whose close relationship anchors the novel, spends decades in the shadow of the vengeance sought by Constable Carl, Twisted River's sadistic and misogynistic lawman and the boyfriend of Daniel's victim. Their journey takes them from Boston to Iowa City to Vermont and then to Toronto as they manage, with the aid of a crusty logger named Ketchum, to stay at least a few steps ahead of their pursuer.
The novel is as intricately and masterfully constructed as a Victorian mansion, erected on Irving's characteristic foundation of flashbacks and foreshadowing. He pays homage to literary forebears like Dickens in inventing a roster of characters with memorable names (such as "Six-Pack Pam," "Injun Jane," the "Yokohama Sisters" and "Lady Sky") and in his portrayal of working class life, from the perils of logging drives to the pungent aromas of restaurant kitchens.
All of the novel's characters, even the most sympathetic ones, are weighed down by the burden of their poor choices and occasional bad behavior. From the window of his writing shack, Danny, now a celebrated author under the name "Danny Angel," can see a small pine tree bent almost at a right angle to itself and that tree. The tree has a "simultaneously tenacious and precarious grip on its own survival," which deftly sums up the world these characters inhabit.
There are bears, a bit of wrestling, terrible accidents, and an unflinching view of the perversity of fate. There's a Blue Mustang to replace Garp's Under Toad from Irving's THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP and even a flatulent dog, Hero, which brings to mind the Berry family's Sorrow from THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE. But the novel isn't merely Irving's attempt to trot out a bag of shopworn tricks to satisfy fans who have stuck with him from one novel to the next. Each of these familiar elements is given a fresh, reinvigorated life here in the service of a warmhearted, emotionally mature work, and reveal why Irving's characterization of Danny ("He was a craftsman, not a theorist; he was a storyteller, not an intellectual") is a fitting bit of self-portraiture.
Irving, who has made no secret of his annoyance with readers and critics who have plumbed his works for evidence of autobiography, doesn't even make a tepid effort to blur those lines here. Danny attends the same prep school (Exeter), college (University of New Hampshire) and graduate writing program (Iowa Writer's Workshop, where Kurt Vonnegut makes a cameo appearance), and the course of his literary career tracks that of his creator. The fact that Irving has made these correspondences so obvious is a not-so-subtle poke in the eye to those embarked on what he perceives as a fool's errand. Yet, as we come to know Danny Angel the writer, we sense we're being granted more than a peek at the creative process of John Irving. "Somehow what struck him about Daniel's fiction," Dominic thinks, as he reflects on his son's novels, "was that it was both autobiographical and not autobiographical at the same time."
LAST NIGHT IN TWISTED RIVER is easily Irving's best work since THE CIDER HOUSE RULES and A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, and is the novel most reminiscent of THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP. He's still asking the same unanswerable question: How do we live happily in a world shadowed by disaster and tragedy, "a world of accidents," as Dominic sees it, amidst what Irving never ceases to remind us is the "fragile, unpredictable nature of things?" Once again, in a way that's held throughout a long and illustrious career, John Irving strikes a blow for the notion that robust popular fiction and literary merit need not be estranged. And as befits a story told by a writer who says he began this novel with the last sentence and then wrote toward it, don't be surprised if, when you turn the final page, the urge to go back to the beginning and start again is nearly irresistible.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg |
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| "Transcendence Through Storytelling" | 2009-10-30 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3IHUDYEOF1C29 |
Not long ago, bon vivant/journalist and self-appointed "Amanuensis of the Zeitgeist," Tom Wolfe publicly proclaimed that John Irving, John Updike and Norman Mailer weren't writing novels that engaged "the life around them"; science fiction/horror/fantasy writer Dan Simmons took up the cry two years later (in a Salon.com interview) saying those writers had "forgotten to tell us anything relevant about today's world." Perhaps its due to the fact that he isn't writing badly-penned, pseudo-erotica that celebrates empty-headed college girls and guys (Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons") or barely-edited, bloated historical novels with increasingly disappearing plots ("Drood", "The Terror"), but where John Irving is concerned, that seems a particularly sour-grape flavored observation. The themes and subplots of Irving's novels have covered feminism ("The World According to Garp"), terrorism ("The Hotel New Hampshire"), abortion and religion ("The Cider House Rules" and "A Prayer for Owen Meany") and the impact of nationalism and "polite" racism ("A Son of the Circus"), the cult of celebrity and infotainment ("The Fourth Hand"), as well as child abuse and mental instability ("Until I Find You"). It's a trend that has continued right on through to Irving's latest, "Last Night in Twisted River," which addresses the issue of escalating, non-stop violence in the United States - a timely, engaging topic, indeed - as a father and son become fugitives for nearly half a century while trying to evade a revenge-minded lawman.
As in "The Cider House Rules," Irving makes good use of the New England landscape, evoking dread via his depictions of harsh, New Hampshire winters as well as the dirty, roiling waters of typical, 1950s-era river drives. The novel opens - near the logging camp of Twisted River - with a particularly harrowing scene of a young logger who has made a fatal error while plying his trade. Not long before, the wife of Cook Dominic Baciagalupo (himself injured, and left limping) is lost to the dark waters and often violent life of a logging camp. Good friend, Libertarian and Luddite, Ketchum, who was present for both events, shares Dominic's grief over his wife, as well as a dark, very personal, secret that reveals itself in due course. So when Dominic's son, Danny, accidentally kills Injun Jane - the live-in "girlfriend" of brutish Constable Carl - after mistaking her for a bear, Ketchum helps Dominic and Danny take it on the lam, in an effort to avoid retribution.
The father and son's escape take them from the wild, untamed woods of upper New Hampshire to a borough of Boston, searching out the family of a recently dead young logger. Dominic eventually falls into a relationship with the deceased young man's mother. A bit of correspondence with veteran logger Ketchum (the strong, unwavering center of this moralistic tale) leads to Constable Carl discovering Dominic and Danny's whereabouts; they flee to Iowa, where Dominic and Danny take on the surname Angel, in honor of the dead young logger and his mother. Danny attends college, takes up the fine art of fiction writing, and fathers a son of his own (after having a sort of "free-love" relationship with an art student), while Dominic continues to get work as a cook. More missteps (not least among them being Danny becoming a bestselling author) make it necessary for father and son to run again - to Colorado, Vermont, etc. - eventually ending up in Canada. But even across the border, Dominic, Danny and Joe (Danny's son) aren't quite safe from the aging, but sadistic and determined, Constable Carl.
While the theme (violence begets violence), and the always-present tension of the father and son's flight from the sociopath Carl, keep up the pace of the novel's plot, Irving's characterizations of Ketchum, Dominic and Danny (who sometimes seem grandfather, father and son; and who are complex enough to sometimes be a bit unlikeable) is the driving force behind the novel. But like "A Son of the Circus" and "Until I Find You," the novel can be a bit complex in it's structure. As he did in "Until I Find You," Irving delves into the unreliability of memory, at one point, illustrating the idea via family photos pinned on a bulletin board by a housecleaner: "Thus Vermont overlapped Boston, or vice-versa..." Accordingly, the middle portion of the novel includes flashbacks of Danny's which can sometimes overlap his "present-day" situation, just as it does with all of us. It's daring and interesting way to handle the narrative, and while it may scare off readers that prefer less challenging reads, those who persevere will find the narrative speed picking up again as father and son must run again from Constable Carl.
Irving also uses this unusual structure to comment -- via a bit of metafictional playfulness -- on the act of writing and being a writer. "Last Night in Twisted River" forms a sort of literary triptych with "Garp" and "A Widow For One Year": each book, at some point, broaches the subject of the imaginative power of fiction; and, in varying degrees, each plays meta-fictional games. Irving has fictional doppelganger Danny change an erroneous viewpoint in his novel-in-progress, just as the viewpoint/narration of "Last Night" is adjusted. And like "Until I Find You," Irving's previous novel, this latest wanders into roman a clef territory, with scenes that seem lifted directly out of Irving's life (including an encounter with the late Kurt Vonnegut). "Last Night" also connects to "Garp" and "Widow" via a dark foreboding which centers on the shadow of death; in previous novels it was the "undertoad" and empty picture hooks; this time, Thanatos glides past in the form of a speeding blue mustang. Like the work of Garp (and Irving), Danny Baciagalupo's fiction obsesses over the sudden loss of children and other loved ones.
But these similarities (and revisiting symbols like bears, wrestling, etc) are just appetizers - teasing games the author plays to befuddle academics and entertain long-time readers. The real meat of the novel comes in the form of Ketchum (one of Irving's finest fictional creations, and a man who can be as violent as the Sheriff stalking Danny and his father) as well as the considerations of how far America's love affair with violence and vengeance has gone. After a particularly brutal encounter with a New England neighbor, while sitting next to a gun-wielding ex-lover, Danny's thoughts go straight to the heart of the matter: "Enough was never enough; there would be no stopping the violence." If that subject matter doesn't make Irving's latest a polemic (in the manner of "Cider House" and "Owen Meany"), surely its open disdain for the declining level of America's I.Q. and the recent Bush/Cheney administration will. Here, author and Irving doppelganger Danny muses: "Since Bush's reelection, Danny had accepted that America was lost to him, and that he was - from this minute forward - an outsider..."
Politics and themes aside, what will carry most readers through from first page to last, are the larger-than-life characters, the impending sense of doom hovering over their heads, and the genuinely moving sadness Irving evokes over the "sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be a part of our lives." Perhaps that is why Irving is sometimes disdained by lesser writers (Wolfe and Simmons) or overlooked in "serious" academic circles: because, in the end, his novels are about the most important thing in human lives: relationships, the dynamics therein, and the people involved in them. A winding, sometimes violently rushing tale that will sweep readers along via the force of John Irving's relentless imagination, "Last Night in Twisted River" will literally carry adventurous souls full-circle: offering up forgiveness, compassion and understanding, solely on the strength and healing power of Irving's (and Danny Baciagalupo's) big-hearted, old-fashioned storytelling.
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 "THE BLITZ REVIEW of TWISTED RIVER" | 2009-10-29 |
| - Reviewed By User: AELW2NWY019EL |
John Irving's twelfth novel "Last Night in Twisted River" has depth as well as heart. It may not be considered by some to be a "Garp" or "Owen Meany", but it trumpets the talent of a great writer.
Some may feel that after the story begins to flow, much like Twisted River itself, the plot meanders a bit and details become tedious. But the novel's end satisfies completely and makes the reader glad to have gone along for the read.
Be on the lookout for much ado about names, limping cooks, farting dogs, bearish women, lethal frying pans, writer's curse, and tongue in cheek nods to the author's past creations.
And bear in mind, sometimes the end can also be the beginning.
BRUCE SPERBER |
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| "Finely crafted tale of revenge and redemption" | 2009-10-29 |
| - Reviewed By alm25 |
I received an advanced copy of this book from Random House. (Thank you!!!)
Reading this book directly after Dan Brown's THE LOST SYMBOL just about gave me whiplash. Whereas Brown seems to think that readers have the attention spans of gnats, Irving takes his time with his story whether his readers get impatient or not.
LAST NIGHT IN TWISTED RIVER begins with a father and son working in the cookhouse of a logging camp in northern New Hampshire. One fateful night, a tragic accident occurs that forces the father and his ten-year-old son to flee Twisted River and its vengeful constable. The story spans fifty years and follows the father and son as they try to move beyond the past and make peace with the present. They always seem only one step ahead of the constable who is determined to kill them both.
It is difficult to describe this book with any accuracy. It is much more than a tale of revenge and flight. It is a story of relationships, survival and loss. Irving is a truly gifted writer. He takes his time with the story making sure the reader has a feel for the landscape as well as the characters within the book. At the book's end, the reader knows the characters so well that it feels as if you have lived a lifetime with them.
This book makes a great read for fall/winter as most of it takes place in cold wintry climes. I felt as if I had to wrap up in a blanket when I read it because Irving was so successful in conveying the cold and chill of the various locales. The story moves back and forth through time in a way that could sometimes be confusing but was ultimately effective. You often discover what happens to characters before you discover HOW it happened.
BOTTOM LINE: Recommended. A beautifully written and moving book that provides just enough of a challenge to make one feel as if they have accomplished something. Irving has redeemed himself in my eyes after his last disastrous novel. (UNTIL I FIND YOU) |
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