I have no doubt that John Irving is a brilliant writer. Some
have compared him to a modern day Charles Dickens. His ability with words, his
way of dealing with a nonlinear plot extraordinary, and while I’ve not read
every book he’s published –this will be the sixth out of the thirteen he’s published
that I’ve read- Last Night in Twisted River reflects how maddeningly difficult
he can be as well.
It’s a story within a story that shows the development of a
novelist and the writing process. It begins in 1954, in the cookhouse of a
logging and sawmills settlement in northern New Hampshire. Danny is an anxious
twelve-year-old, who lives with his widowed farther. One night he is awoken to
odd sounds coming from his father’s room. Still not fully awake, he sees his
father having sex with the local constable’s girlfriend, but in his still
sleepy eyed state, he thinks a bear is attacking his father; with a large
skillet, he accidentally kills the woman. Now both the twelve-year-old and his
father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County–to Boston, to southern
Vermont, to Toronto–pursued by the implacable constable. They do have one
friend, a lone protector who is a fiercely libertarian logger named Ketchum.
Once river driver, Ketchum keeps Danny and his Dad, Dominic, up to date on the
goings on in Twisted River.
In the early part of the book, Irving does capture the
turbulent times, with its mixture of violence and camaraderie that marks the
lives of these tough men and a few even tougher women, French Canadian
immigrants and Indians, anyone who wants or needs to work miles from
civilization. Life, and death, is a way of life in Twisted River, as the book
opens with the tragic loss of a 15 year-old boy, who slips on the wet logs and
drowns (this sets up a mystery that's pursued much later).
Still, the book takes forever to get going –and I might be
even tempted to say it never gets above five miles an hour. Part of the problem
is the focus of the novel; Danny, who becomes this weary kid who grows up to be
a successful writer (which brought to mind what teachers of writing tell their
students: write what you know. Stephen King is another writer who has a
tendency to create characters who just happen to be writers). I know Irving has
said many times that his novels are not autobiographical, yet you can’t help
but think that Danny seems to have the same arc as author did. In this book, Danny
went to Exeter College, he worked as an art model and he studied with Kurt
Vonnegut at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, just like John Irving. Danny
also publishes a couple of moderately successful novels in his 20s, just like John
Irving. His fourth book is an international bestseller that's made into a
popular movie, much like what happened to Irving with his World According to
Garp novel. Also, Irving –via through Danny it seems- takes swipes at reviewers
who take notes that Danny (and Irving) reuses the same themes again and again.
It’s very Meta at times.
This is perhaps the dullest of the six novels I’ve read by
him, but there still are some great parts in the book –the first half
especially. Once the novel moves out of Twisted River, it wanders too much and
that slows the book down to crawl. The villain, if can call him that, is the Sheriff (also known as the Cowboy) who still peruses Dominic for the death of girlfriend, is sort of gut-less and hateful bigot. Yet not hateful enough where the reader feels any dislike for him or his eventual fate. The book is somewhat redeemed later, but it’s
still better than a lot of other stuff that gets released these days.
No comments:
Post a Comment