The epigram from John Irving’s new novel, Last Night in Twisted River, is from the Bob Dylan song “Tangled Up in Blue.” It’s a short snippet that references working as a cook in the great north woods until one day “the ax just fell.” That establishes the premise of the novel: Dominic “Cookie” Baciagalupo has to flee his job as a cook when his son inadvertently mistakes his Indian lover for a bear and clubs her with a skillet. Since she is seeing the town sheriff, Cookie believes the only option is to run.
It is typical Irving: far-fetched and fun, complicated and epic.
While the book shares the premise with the Dylan song, it more closely shares the song’s structure as a series of events that get shuffled chronologically as though past, present, and future occur simultaneously. At one point it’s described in the novel this way: “the near simultaneity of connected but dissimilar momentous events—these are what move a story forward.”
This is Irving’s great feat with Twisted River as he explores time through the lens of parenting. The novel truly focuses on Cookie’s son, though at points three generations of Baciagalupo men co-exist. It spans 1954-2005 ranging from New Hampshire and Boston to Toronto, familiar locations for Irving fans.
IIBut not everyone is a fan of Irving’s not-so-subtle references to his life or to his novels (Danny writes a political abortion book that wins an Academy Award for its film adaptation, a la Cider House Rules).
At The Washington Post, author Ron Charles (in an article titled “Timber! went the plot”) laments Irving’s unevenness: “Everything that makes John Irving such a wonderful writer is on display in the opening section of his 12th novel, Last Night in Twisted River. And everything that makes him such a maddening one is evident in the 450 rambling pages that follow. It’s like signing on for a week’s vacation after a great first date only to discover that now you’re trapped in a small hotel room. For. Seven. Long. Days.” Charles charges that all of the autobiographical allusions in this novel “serve as shorthand for real storytelling.” Charles concludes, “Last Night in Twisted River is like some kind of postmodern tragedy: Danny Baciagalupo’s marvelous novel is smothered inside John Irving’s dull one.”
New York Times reviewer Joanna Scott agrees. She writes, “The coy hints of connections between the author and the narrator have been forced onto a plot that can’t accommodate them.” She also tackles Irving’s willingness to write about fiction. “The fact that Danny is a famous novelist too often seems a mere contrivance, giving Irving a convenient opportunity to include rambling background information and to air his own ideas about writing. In his bid to make something ‘serious,’ Irving has risked distracting readers from what otherwise could be a moving, cohesive story.”
But Charles and Scott miss Irving’s intent. It’s not a stab at postmodern meta-narrative (Irving is more traditional and, like Danny, believes in plot). It’s also not true that making Danny a writer precludes him from saying something serious. While it’s true that Danny gives his views, the serious views about the times really come from Ketchum—he is Danny’s moral compass. Irving did this in A Prayer for Owen Meany as well, allowing John Wheelright to wax eloquent from afar about politics while Owen Meany actually lives out the implications of the thoughts. For Scott to charge that Twisted River isn’t moving clearly overlooks Irving’s most thoughtful theme: the dangers of becoming a parent.
IIIWhen the cook tells Danny, “If becoming a parent doesn’t make you responsible, nothing will,” it’s clear that something transcends writing in Danny’s life. Like a writer he has experienced the joy of creation, but as a parent he must protect that creation. No amount of plotting can save his son, and this lesson continuously breaks his heart.
When trying to impart an irrational but not entirely unbelievable fear to Joe, Danny teaches him that “the blue Mustang wants you—that’s why you’ve got to be careful.” It’s the limitation of real life balanced against the power of imagination, and Danny’s imagination was carved by his father, who taught him that it was “a world of accidents.”
IVAs a writer one of Danny Angel’s mantras is that “So-called real people are never as complete as wholly imagined characters.” Irving seems interested in this idea, that fiction is able to deliver truth in ways that reality is only able to hint at, that “real-life stories were never whole, never complete in the ways that novels could be.”
Irving includes some other nuggets about writing and the writing process as well:
- “Maybe this moment of speechlessness helped to make Daniel Baciagalupo become a writer. All those moments when you know you should speak, but you can’t think of what to say—as a writer , you can never give enough attention to those moments” (128).
- He pays homage to the Romantics of which he is a descendent. “They wrote long, complicated sentences; Hawthorne and Melville had liked semicolons.” And Irving loves italics.
- Drake: “I’m into writing, not rewriting. I only like the creative part.”
Danny: “But rewriting is writing. Sometimes, rewriting is the most creative part.” - “Was Danny superstitious? (Most writers who believe in plot are.)”
Though people like to compare Irving and Dickens (and Irving likes to encourage the comparison) and at one point Irving even has Danny sneer at critics’ praise of symbolism, Irving is able to do it the right way. He doesn’t inject objects to carry the story or overburden the narrative with the weight of some abstract gymnastics. Instead, he allows the objects (like the skillet, the blue Mustang, or the wind-swept pine) to function first and take meaning later, only after the characters themselves attach meaning within their lives. In other words, the symbolism comes from within the narrative rather than existing outside of it or hovering over it. He did this in A Prayer for Owen Meany (the foul ball, the armadillo, etc.) and I think perhaps most hauntingly in A Widow for One Year in the descriptions of the absence pictures on the wall.
VAt a time when the literati demand psychological or lyrical realism, what to make of a big-hearted, epic book about plot? Look at the past few Pulitzer Prize winners. Olive Kitteridge is a collection of stories. The Road is a work of psychological realism. March and Gilead were hardly about plot as much as the interior lives of the characters. While The Known World was plotted, the plot fell into the background of the author’s larger intentions to explore a time and a place. Really Irving is most like Michael Chabon in his willingness to tackle big stories. And Chabon won the Pulitzer before September 11.
LA Times reviewer Daniel Mallory said, “Irving’s first novel to reconfigure those Irving-esque devices — the doomed naif, the artist in bloom, the sweet, bitter tug-of-war between duty and destiny — into a tale as introspective as it is retrospective. It’s simultaneously every story he’s ever published and something altogether new.”
Irving’s comedy—though it’s more subtle and less zany than The Hotel New Hampshire, Ketchum’s dog does still fart and the scene with Lady Sky landing at the artist’s party in the pig sty is as good as Irving gets.
In closing, you read Irving for plot and character, and he offers one of his finest in the character of Ketchum. The old logger haunts the book in a larger-than-life way. He slept with Danny’s mom, he plays guardian angel once Danny and Cookie flee, he calls throughout the novel, he drives with a bear he shot in his passenger seat, and he’s always armed. As he ages, his moral dilemma becomes clear and poignant, and it’s in characters like Ketchum that Irving ultimately rewards his readers.
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