A wind stooped pine tree. A driverless blue mustang. A skydiving giantess. An eight inch cast iron skillet. These are the vivid images carried through John Irving’s twelfth novel, Last Night in Twisted River. The book begins in 1956 in a New Hampshire logging settlement called Twisted River where twelve year old Daniel Baciagalupo inadvertently kills someone with the aforementioned skillet, thinking a bear has broken into the house. The boy and his father Dominic, the cook for the logging village, are forced to go on the run, cutting all ties except for those with the live free or die logger, Ketchum. Their flight lasts for over forty years and takes them from Boston to Iowa to Vermont and even to Canada, forcing them to restart their lives again and again, the only constant being each other.
Daniel Baciagalupo proves to be almost an archetype of the Irving protagonist: he is born in New Hampshire, has only one living parent, attends Phillips Exeter, goes to the University of New Hampshire, has multiple relationships with older women and has a penchant for coming up with aphoristic phrases. Despite following this constantly recurring life path, the story unfolds slightly differently. Many of John Irving’s past novels focus on the escapades and experiences of boarding school and the sexually dysfunctional early twenties of the main characters, but most of Last Night in Twisted River takes place after Daniel is well settled in his career and is a father himself. Much of the book is also told through the eyes of Dominic, Daniel’s father, giving the narration a slightly older, slightly more resigned, sometimes more effective feel.
As with all of John Irving’s novels, fate is constantly catching up with the Baciagalupos for better or worse. The incident with the skillet is far from the last glimpse of death in the book, but John Irving is a master at capturing modern tragedy. While many of the settings and characters come with beautifully saturated description and quirky, unapologetic details, the author writes about death and loss with an almost painful restraint. It throbs out in pieces as if it were being spoken between sobs, and it is a harrowing experience, even though the reader knows it’s coming. No one can set a foreboding undertow quite like John Irving.
Despite all that is lost throughout Last Night in Twisted River, the book is by no means a five hundred page volume of utter depression. Irving’s characteristicly bizarre and usually eloquent humor pops up throughout the novel, often at the most surprising of moments. There are a few extra laughs for New Englanders like myself in the descriptions of and jabs at various places and attitudes from the region, especially in New Hampshire. The book also comes to a close, nearly fifty years after it began, in a hopeful moment, showing, as Irving always has, the inescapable resilience of humanity.
Fans of Irving’s work will find much familiar to love in this latest novel, but also a sense of the writer’s evolution. Over forty years after his first novel was published, he is still growing as an author. For those who have never read his books, this is a wonderful place to start. Last Night in Twisted River is vintage John Irving with a different sort of shine.
Related posts:
- John Irving returns to read at Mount Holyoke College
- A familiar voice makes “A Phone Call to the Future”
- Novelists Russo, Wroblewski talk shop with MHC professor Martin
- Highbrow hypocrites:
- Q&A with Richard Russo
