‘Twisted River’ finds Irving wrestling with familiar themes
FICTION
Last Night in Twisted River” couldn’t have a better beginning, (or ending, since they are nearly the same). In one intense, packed paragraph, John Irving plunges totally, recklessly, into the icy grip of fate with the sudden, tragic death of a young teenager in a logging camp.
Before we even meet poor Angel Pope, he is gone beneath the heaving logs churning down the icy, twisted river. His fate is sealed in one seamless sentence: “For a frozen moment, his feet had stopped moving on the floating logs in the basin above the river bend; he’d slipped entirely underwater before anyone could grab his outstretched hand.”
And then, Irving continues on for 554 more pages, pushing and pulling his 12th novel across a half-century of hit-and-miss history in a long back and forth struggle with mortality.
His heroes are the logging camp’s widowed cook, Dominic Baciagalupo, and Dominic’s son, Daniel, who is 12 and a friend of the lost Angel Pope. Dominic is small and limps; Daniel is thoughtful and sensitive. The two don’t really belong among the rough and racy men and women who make their livings in the unforgiving forest. We know that the Baciagalupos won’t be there long.
Which is kind of a shame. Irving sets a great scene up there in the postwar backwoods, and then he leaves his best characters there.
Not a total surprise. Irving is one of our more uneven producers of best-selling literary fiction. Despite its rich beginning, “Twisted River” falls somewhere in the middle of his output. Not as compelling as “The World According to Garp” or as controversial as “Cider House Rules” (the “abortion” book), it still contains some powerful scenes, an ambitious theme and one standout character, a crusty old logger named Ketchum who turns out to be the invisible, guiding hand behind most of the major events in the book.
The problems — and there are problems — are both of excess and scarcity. Too much “writer’s workshop-produced” detail takes us nowhere, but there’s also too little insight into key characters — all right, into the female characters—to make us care about them.
A tragic event in Twisted River (that’s the New Hampshire logging town, not the actual river), leads the cook to flee with his son in the dark of night in early pages. They are running not specifically from the law but from a drunken, abusive lawman who is referred to throughout their long exodus. He, too, is otherwise invisible — like a hooded Grim Reaper, liable to strike them down at any time.
Considering that mortality is what his book is about, it’s odd that Irving keeps his death symbols — Carl the deputy, a driverless Blue Mustang — largely on deep background. Like death itself, he never really gets a handle on them. Hearsay in this case is not too hard to disregard.
The anxiety, the foreboding, the fear — we experience those through Danny, Irving’s alter ego. The boy’s mother is dead before the book starts; Angel is lost in the first paragraph; another dear friend dies horribly shortly afterward; and Daniel is still a child.
Later, after Daniel/John has become a writer, his friend Ketchum and his father reflect on his successful works:
“Danny Angel’s (he has changed his name, just like Irving did) novels had much to do with what the writer feared might happen . . . namely, what every parent fears most: losing a child. . . . [He] seemed driven to imagine the worst that could happen in any situation.”
And then we read on, and read some more.
The two move to Boston, to Iowa, to New England, to Toronto; Dominic grows older and becomes an expert chef; Danny grows older, is a father and famous; and we, like the phantom deputy, stay on their trail. Where is Irving taking us? Where does the hairy guy with the dead dog fit in? And what about the topless Amazonian skydiver at the pig farm? And, will Irving ever, ever reconcile his father issues?
A writing class would surely have a fine job parsing this out over the course of a semester, psychoanalyzing the writer along with critiquing his style, but it reminded me of an earlier Irving book, 2005’s “Until I Find You.”
A character — a writer (Irving’s books contain lots of writers) — has one of her books made into “a better movie than the novel. . . . Many book reviewers complained that the novel was written with the future screenplay in mind.”
The same foreboding of “future screenplay” haunts this book—bare-bone characters (Direction: Actor fill in personality here) populating heavily detailed sets while they pass through the lives of flawed heroes.
Irving is, of course, just being himself, or yet another fictional version of it. Danny becomes a writer, and like his creator, he maintains internal and external monologues exploring his craft, exploiting his life, his friends and his family in the production of his work. For a little literary verisimilitude, he drops in the occasional real person, Kurt Vonnegut among them.
Danny’s books are Irving’s in costume. The New England setting and Toronto are recurring characters, too, familiar territory for the former wrestler (just like Danny’s son!) who doesn’t write sequels but somehow . . . does.
Irving covers half a century in “Twisted River,” with his fugitives a personification at times of the American experience. Vietnam. Conservative politics. Sept. 11. George W. Bush. All get walk-ons, but for those over 40, their response is more “been there, done that” than enlightened recognition.
Because of the scope of his hefty manuscripts, Irving is compared to Dickens from time to time, including a blurb from The Nation on the dust-flap of this book. Not this time. Dickens artfully built his tales with no cameos, no extraneous characters. Each to a purpose. The men and the women.
John Irving loves his cook and his writer, and his old logger. But the women are made of such flimsy cardboard it is a wonder they don’t billow off the page. Sex. Procreation. More casual sex. Betrayal. Childhood fantasies. They are victims, they are seductresses, they are students and colleagues. But they are never, ever really there.
But what is there, is better than just OK. At 67, Irving is trying mightily to communicate his philosophy of writing and life. Of fathers and sons, and lost fathers and lost sons. At least since “Garp,” he has been wrestling with the same themes. He hasn’t completely pinned them yet, but he definitely scores some takedowns here.
Melinda Miller is an editor in the Features Department of The Buffalo News.
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