John Irving. Last Night in Twisted River.
New York: Random House, 2009.
As reviewed by Ted Odenwald
Lumber camp cook and single father, Dominic Baciagalupo, knew that he must flee with his 12-year-old son, Danny, from their remote location. Danny, mistaking his father’s 300-pound lover for a bear, had struck her a fatal blow with his father’s 8” skillet. The shocking violence is tempered by their hilarious efforts to dispose of the victim by carting her on a kitchen dolly to the cabin of her drunken, abusive boyfriend. Despite warnings from his salty, crude, and loyal logger friend, Ketchum, that if they run, they will always be on the run, Dominic decides that he must protect his son, giving them as many years together as possible. What follows is an intricately woven pattern of events, carrying the main characters to Boston, Vermont, Iowa, and Toronto through five decades. Dominic, who has an “aura of controlled apprehension” about his son, is obsessed with protecting him in a “world of accidents.”
Not surprisingly for an Irving novel, violence occurs in many creative forms: drownings in logging river runs; shootings; mutilations; accidents; and the constant threat of the vengeful Constable Carl, who is more a shadowy angel of death than a defender of the peace. In contrast to the violence is a collection of protectors or “angels.” Ketchum continually reports to Dominic, cautioning him about the movements of the officer; Amy, a.k.a. “Sky Lady,” literally descends from the clouds (as a parachutist) and eventually becomes the protecting angel of Danny; Katie, Danny’s wife, protects young men by bearing “Kennedy children” so that the men might receive draft deferments during the Viet Nam war.
Both father and son have special creative gifts. Dominic learned to cook by working with his mother in the kitchen; he eventually surpassed her in culinary skills, and after he seriously injured his leg, he sought employment in the camp’s kitchen. During his years of “hiding,” he became an exceptional chef in a number of restaurants, developing his skills in preparing several ethnic cuisines..
Danny eventually became a writer. Having learned to watch carefully, he observed Dominic beginning a relationship with the mother of a boy who had perished in a logging run at Twisted River; “Maybe this was one of those moments that [Dan] became a writer—his first and inevitably awkward attempt at foreshadowing. The boy suddenly saw into his father’s future…” and knew that it would be sad. And when he wanted to warn his father, the boy was speechless. Perhaps, suggests Irving, “this moment of speechlessness helped to make [Dan] become a writer. All these 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 these moments.”
As one continues to read about Danny’s writing, there are distant echoes of both Irving’s novel The World According to Garp and his non-fiction work My Writing Business. He presents a number of precepts that appear to guide Danny as well as Irving:
-Writers must be able to detach themselves from their subjects and their characters.
-A story is driven by “the near simultaneity of connected but dissimilar momentous acts.”
-“In any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.”
-Characters are distorted representations of people the author had known.
– A writer must be completely at ease being naked in front of strangers and total [—-]-heads.
Obviously, the reader has to wonder the extent to which Danny is actually Irving himself. Both the author and the character attended Exeter Academy; both attended the University of New Hampshire; both received MFA degrees from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop in Iowa City; both were mentored by Kurt Vonnegut. Both admit that their writing was autobiographical and yet not autobiographical. There is also a similarity in the patterns of success in their writing careers. One novel, East of Bangor, is Danny’s “abortion novel,” –a probable allusion to Irving’s Cider House Rules. And each author writes the screenplay for his respective novel.
At one point, Irving says that Danny’s novels were “…ransacked for every autobiographical scrap; his novels had been dissected and overanalyzed for whatever could be construed as the virtual meaning hidden inside them.” Guilty!! I can’t help but feel that with all of his memorable character development, and his masterfully constructed plots, he is playing with his readers, using “autobiographical” tidbits as bait as he trolls for bottom-feeding critics to demonstrate that they don’t know what they are talking about.
I hope that I haven’t taken the bait too easily—or totally swallowed it.
Ted Odenwald and his wife, Shirley have lived in Oakland for 42 years. He taught HS English at Glen Rock High School for all of those years plus one more. Now he is enjoying time spent with his family, singing in the North Jersey Chorus and quenching his wanderlust. Ted is also the Worship Leader at the Ramapo Valley Baptist Church in Oakland.