![]() And by novel's end - "Twisted River" clocks in at 550-odd (sometimes very odd) pages, positively svelte by Irving standards - a constellation of characters aligns across the vault of half a century: loves lost, friends found, guardian angels, snakes in the grass. Like his creator, Danny enrolls at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and soon launches a literary career. "It's nobody's fault."īut it is, of course, even though Danny's misbegotten prey appeared "both bigger and hairier than what the boy had ever imagined a bear could be." By morning, the two have fled Twisted River, and thereafter Danny's life - swollen with fortune and mishap - will challenge any received notions of fate, faith and happenstance. ![]() "The cook's vocabulary often made reference to avoidable accidents," Irving explains, "and his twelve-year-old son was overfamiliar with his father's grim and fatalistic thoughts on human fallibility." When Danny mistakes a neighbor woman for a bear and bludgeons her with a skillet - readers will recall the errant foul ball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany" - Dominic the ontologist reconsiders: "It was an accident," he decides. Sobered, both in spirit and in diet, by his wife's drowning a decade earlier, padre Baciagalupo clings to his only child. Dominic and Danny Baciagalupo - the name, and its provenance, as treacherous as the river where the stunted family makes its home - sling barracks hash for the lumberjacks in a logging camp near the Quebec border. Like most Irving narratives, "Twisted River" resists summary. It's simultaneously every story he's ever published and something altogether new. This isn't a comeback so much as a coming-of-age: Irving's first novel to reconfigure those Irving-esque devices - the doomed naif, the artist in bloom, the sweet, bitter tug-of-war between duty and destiny - into a tale as introspective as it is retrospective. Majestic yet intimate, shot with whimsy, dread and molten pathos, "Twisted River" compresses the panoramic scope of his midcareer legacy without diluting its brio. Not since the shambolic but cruelly underrated "A Son of the Circus" has he delivered a novel so full-throated, hot-blooded and clear-eyed not since "A Widow for One Year" has he sculpted a story with such poise not since Garp has he so trenchantly assessed the writer's craft. ![]() "Vigor mortis," the critics chorused.īut as "Twisted River" proves, reports of Irving's demise are greatly exaggerated. Granted, his tropes are conspicuously unvaried, his prose rhythms almost lock step and yes, his last two novels - the sunken-chested "The Fourth Hand" and the gloomy picaresque "Until I Find You" - wheezed and sputtered like faulty engines. Four iconic novelists, yet only Irving has in recent years weathered complaint, even contempt, for plying his stock-in-trade - the neo-Dickensian saga, liberally flavored with deviant sex and grotesquerie. And Don DeLillo's career represents a 40-year meditation on the ravages of consumerism - commercial, spiritual, political. Richard Ford has yet to write a novel in which flinty American manhood and the dissolution of community do not mutually refract. Garp, becomes a man of letters, and throughout the story, an insistent ursine leitmotif recalls both "The Pension Grillparzer" (Garp's debut) and "Setting Free the Bears" (Irving's). Later, our precocious protagonist, taking his cue from T.S. Fractured family? But of course: Irving heroes, like those in Dickens and Disney cartoons, are invariably short a parent or two here, young Danny Baciagalupo's mother absents herself early on, sucked beneath the frosted tide of Twisted River one bleak midwinter's night in 1944. ![]() Subversive Christian symbolism? Double-check: The first character introduced is fallen Angel Pope. New England? Check: The story begins in New Hampshire, where Irving once situated an eponymous hotel. ![]() The opening passages of "Last Night in Twisted River" recycle John Irving's signature themes at such dizzy speed, it's as though the author were ticking boxes. ![]()
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