'Twisted River' flows through Irving's own life
John Irving packs a lot — too much at times — into his 12th novel. But if you like sprawling family stories with sexual complications, memorable characters and reflections on writing, then "Last Night in Twisted River" is for you.
Set between 1954 and 2005, it's an adventure story about the making of an Irving-like novelist.
It also deals with deadly accidents, absent parents and how a novelist's imagination is shaped — familiar themes for the author of "The World According to Garp" and "A Widow for One Year."
It opens vividly at a New Hampshire logging camp, where an accident turns the camp's crippled cook and his 12-year-old son into fugitives, hunted by a crazed drunk of a cop.
Under new names, they make new lives: The boy becomes a famous novelist, his father a talented chef. They move a lot, get entangled with women and remain haunted by the cop out to kill them.
Like Irving, the novelist attends the Iowa Writers Workshop and writes a best-selling abortion novel, much like Irving's "The Cider House Rules."
In one of many asides, Irving writes, "In the media, real life was more important than fiction." Parts of a novel based on an author's own experiences were of more interest than the parts that were "'merely' made up."
Irving was never a fugitive, logger or chef, yet it's those parts of his novel — "merely made up" — that are most compelling.
The best character is the cook's best friend, a logger "tougher than his caulk boots" who's an adult when he learns to read. His idea of foreplay is a woman reading aloud Dostoevsky's "The Idiot."
The late Kurt Vonnegut, who taught Irving at Iowa, has a walk-on role. "A kind man and good teacher," Vonnegut advises the novel's fictional novelist to go easy on semicolons: "People will probably figure out that you went to college — you don't have to try to prove it to them."
Vonnegut offers a blessing: "Maybe capitalism will be kind to you." It has been to Irving. "Last Night in Twisted River" shows why, semicolons and all.
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