JOHN IRVING’S 12TH NOVEL begins in medias res.
We’re immediately thrust into the action: A 15-year-old working a
logging drive in northern New Hampshire falls into the river and is
sucked under the logs. But the boy is dead by the end of the first
paragraph, so Irving backtracks with lengthy expository and the
repetition of seemingly minor details. It’s a trick Irving practices
throughout Last Night in Twisted River; each of the book’s six
sections jars us forward chronologically, then slowly looks back over
the intervening story. And, as in Irving’s previous work, those
seemingly minor details become mantras—as crucial to the plot as
the boy’s violent drowning.
It’s a large book, and it’s a welcome return to form for Irving,
whose last two novels—the myopic Until I Find You and the
flat-out dreadful The Fourth Hand—indicated he might have
lost his wonderful touch for long, absurdly comic, sexually charged,
New England-based stories. Twisted River is a fine read, dealing
with many of Irving’s favored themes: parent-child relationships (the
story follows the logging camp’s cook and his son Danny over half a
century), absent parents (when Danny was a baby, his mother also
drowned in that river), writing (Danny grows up to be a writer), and
bears (Danny mistakes a woman for one, and kills her).
After Danny accidentally kills the woman-bear, he and his father
flee New Hampshire. Their lives are spent on the run, but Irving draws
out the chase over decades—it’s a mere clothesline for Irving to
hang the rest of the story. Danny’s career as a writer mirrors Irving’s
own, and part of the book’s fun is guessing which elements are based in
real life (almost none, Irving/Danny would like you to believe): “A
fiction writer’s job was imagining, truly, a whole story—as Danny
had subversively said, whenever he was given the opportunity to defend
the fiction in fiction writing—because real-life stories
were never whole, never complete in the ways that novels could be.”
Irving has always been a classicist; his books have resembled the
winding but straightforward narratives of the 19th century. Twisted
River is the closest thing he’s done to postmodernism. It
frequently becomes about itself—there’s even a chapter titled
“In Medias Res.” Danny struggles to keep his life and his
fiction separate—much in the way that he and his father attempt
to keep their past at bay, but ultimately become defined by it. Irving
writes, “‘If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves,’
Danny said aloud to himself—as if he were writing this down,
which he wasn’t.”