Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving - review

Last Night in Twisted River by John IrvingJohn Irving's novel, 20 years in the making, is his most autobiographical yet, says Stephanie Merritt
The Observer, Sunday 1 November 2009

John Irving has sown autobiographical themes throughout his novels, but always obliquely, in ways that resist simplistic comparisons. He has frequently pointed out to interviewers that many of his preoccupations come purely from imagination and that he considers these just as "autobiographical" as those that proceed from personal experience.

His intricately crafted 12th novel examines, in minute detail, the formation of an American novelist over the past 50 years; through his most overtly autobiographical character, Irving mounts a passionate defence of the art of fiction.

The novel opens in 1954 in the New Hampshire logging camp of Twisted River with two tragic accidents in quick succession. A 15-year-old logger is drowned; then, 12-year-old Daniel Baciagalupo, son of the camp's cook, kills a native American woman, mistaking her for a bear. Daniel's widowed father, Dominic, makes the decision to run from Twisted River with his son before the body is discovered, even though he knows the woman's violent boyfriend, the local constable, Carl, will be consumed with the desire for revenge.

Over the next half-century, the course of Dominic and Daniel's lives (and, later, that of Daniel's son, Joe) is determined by this choice. From Boston to Vermont, to Iowa and Toronto, through several name changes and numerous transitory women, the promise of Carl's vengeance drives the Baciagalupo men onwards, just as, in Irving's vivid descriptions, the relentless and often fatal force of the Androscoggin river drives the freshly cut logs downstream to the mills.

Daniel becomes bestselling novelist Danny Angel, whose writing career follows familiar lines. He publishes a novel about an abortionist that is adapted into an Oscar-winning film; like Irving, he is mentored by Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Iowa. The drama of his formative years surfaces in various ways throughout his novels, though the people closest to him complain that the author remains elusive in his books. "Somehow what struck [the cook] about Daniel's fiction was that it was both autobiographical and not autobiographical at the same time."

Through Danny, Irving draws back the curtain to reveal something of the novelist's process: the ways in which elements of experience, recurring preoccupations and, above all, imagination come together in unique configurations to create the self-contained world of a novel, an art form in danger of being sidelined by the media's obsession with "reality".

"Who else was more interested in fictiLast Night in Twisted River is also a novel about men, about the human need to construct narrative and pattern out of coincidence in "a world of accidents", as Danny's father likes to put it. "Was Danny superstitious?" the narrator asks at one point, before immediately answering: "Most writers who believe in plot are." It is further evidence of Irving's playfulness and not altogether a surprise to the reader to learn at the end that the novel we have been reading was being written by Danny Angel all along.

Though Constable Carl is barely glimpsed over the five decades, the threat of his pursuit underpins the narrative so powerfully that once this element of the story has reached its climax, some time before the end, the remainder of the book loses momentum and becomes more didactic. This final section, which appears as a kind of epilogue, begins with the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. In common with many serious novelists, Danny Angel struggles to respond as a writer; the media urge him to be more politicised, but Danny, who in his youth wrote a novel about Vietnam, finds himself unable to muster the political fury expected of him. He tells interviewers, somewhat defensively: "I'm a fiction writer – meaning that I won't ever write about the September Eleventh attacks, though I may use those events, when they're not so current, and then only in the context of a story of my own devising." By 2004, "the politics on the writer's refrigerator had become tedious. Conceivably, politics had always been boring, and the writer had only now noticed". Fiction, at least for Danny Angel, remains the more vivid means of understanding the world.

Irving has said that this novel was 20 years in the making, and this slow process of maturing has left the book rich with vintage Irving motifs. Once again, he demonstrates his instinctive ear for language, for the subtle distinctions in voice and idiom that give his full-bodied characters their individual resonances, although there are moments when the author's insistence on the uniqueness of a writer's sensibility is overplayed: waiting to receive bad news, "Danny had already imagined a few of the details – the way writers do". The way anyone does, surely, in those circumstances?

Similarly, the sheer exuberance of detail – reminiscent of the 19th-century novels Irving admires – at times threatens to overwhelm the story. But for the most part, Last Night in Twisted River is a big, old-fashioned novel in the best sense; Irving has created in painstaking, loving detail a whole and complete world, a record of momentous social changes, but, above all a testament to the enduring power of love and fiction.

Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving
576pp,
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC,
£18.00

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/01/last-night-twisted-river-irving