The world of Twisted River according to Irving

LAST NIGHT IN TWISTED RIVER

By John Irving

Random House

Available at select National Book Store branches

Dominic Baciagalupo, one of the three heroes central to John Irving’s tedious and blundering new novel, is a virtuoso Italian cook portrayed with “an air of aloofness about his conduct, or a noticeable detachment in his demeanor, and even something melancholic in his bearing.” His best friend Ketchum, a “wicked tough” logger who strikes out as “hardened and sharp-edged,” is another one of the major players in this story. Both remind us of one quintessential Irving character — the eclectic, sometimes violent, and accident- happy person who finds company with a bizarre troupe of fictional bears, wrestlers, crazy New Englanders, and moribund cohorts, all who return from previous novels wearing disguises retailored to a familiar script overstuffed with tangential details and turgid subplots. 

Dominic’s son, Daniel, likewise embodies another Irving archetype — the fiction writer who pursues answers to his fractured life by intertwining reality with his vivid imagination. While readers acquainted with the author’s best-known novel, The World According to Garp, will find a common thread connecting these heroes, the arguments explored in Irving’s earlier masterpiece were framed under more finely drawn, philosophical inquests that delineate fact from fantasy without indulging in the melodramatic affectations or the campy Grand Guignol that colors this most recent work.

Last Night in Twisted River begins not coincidentally in Twisted River, a timber-rich “temporary” town in the American northeast threatened by “the restless spirit of modernity.” A sad and unseen prologue had taken the life of Dominic’s wife Rosie, who met her demise in the violent rapids notoriously dubbed as “documented killers.”  But that’s only the beginning — a string of repetitious and awful deaths would follow the poor signora in this clumsy melodrama about an America in flux, an America grappling with the violent, rapid-like changes of its racial, religious, and political demographic.

The story prominently spins around a messy, five-decade embroilment that begins when a 12-year-old Daniel slams a heavy skillet onto his nanny’s temple, killing her; he’d assumed that the enormous figure doing the “do-si-do” on top of his father was a bear.  Because his nanny was tied to a vengeful constable, Dominic and Daniel absconded from Twisted River, embarking on a winded and immature wild goose chase around the continent, settled only half a century later in a fatal shootout.

After the escape, Dominic drifts around as a cook in a medley of immigrant restaurants, with the passing of the times and the hodgepodge of international cuisines reflecting the changing face of an immigrant nation. When Dominic isn’t dallying with zaftig women, he can be found futzing around with black Sicilian olives, Chinese monkfish medallions, a sweet tomato sauce with sardines, Thai fish sauce, or nori rolls in random segments that seem clumsily extracted out of the Food Network. Given that this book wasn’t titled Dominic and Julia, the cook’s pedantically chronicled career in food, along with the innumerable foodie passages in this jumbled buffet of a book, read like distracting exercises for Irving to flex his gastronomic muscle.  In fact, the only segment where food pivotally propels the plot concerns his pizza dough’s secret ingredient, honey — a well-acknowledged trade practice had anyone paid attention to cooking shows involving Mario Batali or Wolfgang Puck. 

Meanwhile, the teenage Daniel begins to exhibit his talent for creative writing. Although his grades falter in other classes, and while his writing isn’t ideally “academic,” his top-notch skills nail him a spot in the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop — incidentally, the same program Irving graduated from.  There, the legendary writer Kurt Vonnegut kindly instructs him in the do’s and don’ts of punctuation and life.  His writing blossoms, and under his pseudonym “Danny Angel,” he publishes his work and flourishes as a bestselling author. 

As he hustles about with his father, Danny eventually learns to reconcile with his past, reincarnating various interludes of his life within the pages of his fiction. Even as tragedy continues to beleaguer him, he learns to cope with it by investing his relationships in the interesting, if somewhat eccentric and two-dimensional, people he interacts with during his continental wanderings. His writing moves with the nation’s history, its shifting politics and the calamitous turns of events that leave visible imprints on his art and his person. 

Daniel Baciagalupo, more so than the majority of slapstick cartoons in this novel, fleshes out a rather marvelous and captivating figure, perhaps one of the author’s strongest characters yet since forging his eponymous hero from The World According to Garp. Certainly, Irving has invested much energy into creating a character of such moving immediacy; and certainly, his ambitions to lay out his interpretation of a history running through the horrors and tragedies of the racially tense ’50s, Vietnam, the Twin Towers, and this economically dismal aftermath outlines an ambition to reveal the untrammeled voices of the common man.

However, one of the main and most glaring problems in this novel lies in the mind-numbing details that can drag readers on some twisting path to nowhere.  Notwithstanding his annoying habit of trailing spoilers all over the place, Irving’s over-ornamentation tends to confound the plot by mixing in such smarmy and profusely interpolated addenda about food, bears, wrestling, gruesome accidents, and other galling thematic idiosyncrasies. 

On that note, while bleeding chunks of this novel are bogged down by Irving’s writerly excess, trimming away the camp and the intemperate layers of stuff unveils a rather touching and personal message — one that urges us, as the author had noted in an interview, not to take the people we love for granted. 

In one excerpt from the tail-end of the novel, he writes: “We don’t always have a choice how we get to know one another.  Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly — as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth — the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.” 

Irving is undoubtedly a gifted storyteller, and, like many of the writers in his fiction, one blessed with a broad and colorful imagination. The intentions of his fiction, however unclear at the onset, merit notice and remembrance for their candor and beauty. This latest novel, despite its lack of clarity, is no exception.  Pity that he had to bury it in so much junk.