Just Finished Reading John Irving's Last Night in Twisted River

Many years ago, I once saw an episode on the 1980s sitcom Newhart, in which Bob Newhart's lead character, an author living in Vermont, had just published a novel.  Curiously, every character in his story was almost exactly like a "real"-life friend or family member...and the laughs began as each of the people discovered themselves in the book and reacted to their portrayal.  It was a pretty funny episode, as I remember it.  And that memory has returned after reading John Irving's novel Last Night in Twisted River. 

In Last Night in Twisted River, published in 2009 and which I've just finished reading, John Irving explores the craft of writing through the character Daniel Baciagalupo, a cook's son who spends his childhood years at a logging camp in New Hampshire.  As the result of a horrible accident at the camp, Dominic, the father and his son are forced to flee elsewhere, with the aid of Dominic's close friend, Ketchum, as they try to avoid the wrath of the sadistic and vengeful Constable Carl.  Starting in 1954, the story flashes back to 1942 and then jumps ahead in spurts, to 1967, 1975, 1983, 2000, 2001...and, finally, 2005.  But even with that abrupt progression, the story isn't told in a linear chronological order...in 1983, for example, events from earlier years are told in flashbacks, a frequent device of Irving in this novel. As for my earlier allusion to Newhart, Daniel as a novelist keeps churning out book after book whose characters are eerily close to the people in his past and present...to the point where his father discovers details of his son's life that otherwise would have been too intimate and controversial to discuss openly. Parallel to this, Irving himself seems to be revealing his own life through this author, who has renamed himself with "Danny Angel" as his pen name.   For example, Danny goes to an Iowa writers workshop where he meets and befriends the great author Kurt Vonnegut...it was actually Irving himself who did this in real life.  And the New Hampshire setting along with Daniel's attendance at Exeter Academy closely dovetails with Irving's personal experiences...along with the fact that both Daniel and John were able to avoid being sent off to Vietnam during that war because they were fathers of young children. In all of this, Irving seems to be telling his readers that in order to write effectively, you must put all of yourself into it and avoid self-restraint...and that will most likely result in your own personal experiences, along with the people you come to know and the events you encounter, in one form or another, becoming a part of your stories...consciously or unconsciously. In other words, each of us has to write from where we are, not from the point of view of some hypothetical "objective" person: they don't exist, anyway...

I was frustrated at the often foolish decisions made by Danny, Dominic, and Ketchum in the story, but now, looking back on it, I respect Irving for having made these characters seem so real through their imperfections.  On the other hand, the author unrealistically had Danny, in his forties, going out on casual 6-to-7-mile country runs, in which he could collect his thoughts and come up with new writing material...all the while running at a 6-to-7 minutes-per-mile pace.  Casually. A little too fast for my tastes, I would think...

As a couple of side notes, if you're inclined toward the culinary arts, you'd enjoy the many sections in the book that Irving devoted to different types of food and how they are prepared.  And for the politics junkies among you, there's plenty of that, too, with Irving expressing, through his characters, what he thinks about George W. Bush and his policies.  Although I wasn't too keen on the political potshots, I did appreciate that the author had people well into their elder years, several even well into their eighties, who were active, lucid, and deeply involved in the high drama of the story.  In this it reminded me of Stephen King's earlier novel Insomnia, one of my favorites of his...