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Summary
Summary
In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. 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. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them.
In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River --John Irving's twelfth novel--depicts the recent half-century in the United States as "a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course." From the novel's taut opening sentence--"The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long"--to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the historical authenticity and emotional authority of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is also as violent and disturbing a story as John Irving's breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp.
What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author's unmistakable voice--the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller. Near the end of this moving novel, John Irving 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."
Author Notes
John Irving published his first novel at the age of twenty-six. He has received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation; he has won an O. Henry Award, a National Book Award, and an Academy Award.
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Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Irving (The World According to Garp) returns with a scattershot novel, the overriding themes, locations and sensibilities of which will probably neither surprise longtime fans nor win over the uninitiated. Dominic "Cookie" Baciagalupo and his son, Danny, work the kitchen of a New Hampshire logging camp overlooking the Twisted River, whose currents claimed both Danny's mother and, as the novel opens, mysterious newcomer Angel Pope. Following an Irvingesque appearance of bears, Cookie and Danny's "world of accidents" expands, precipitating a series of adventures both literary and culinary. The ensuing 50-year slog follows the Baciagalupos from a Boston Italian restaurant to an Iowa City Chinese joint and finally a Toronto French cafe, while dovetailing clumsily with Danny's career as the distinctly Irving-like writer Danny Angel. The story's vicariousness is exacerbated by frequent changes of scene, self-conscious injections of how writers must "detach themselves" and a cast of invariably flat characters. With conflict this meandering and characters this limp, reflexive gestures come off like nostalgia and are bound to leave readers wishing Irving had detached himself even more. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal Review
Irving's latest work (after Until I Find You) concerns a writer (Daniel) and his cook-father (Dominic) who had to flee their not-so-beloved New Hampshire town after young Dan accidentally killed Dominic's lover, Jane, mistaking her for a bear and hitting her with an iron pan (not played for laughs). For nearly 50 years, they evade the only cop in town (Carl, who was in love with Jane), finally ending up in Canada, where a violent act compels the survivors to change their names and abandon friends, except for Ketchum, a gun-toting liberal (note the inverse cliche) who gives the novel its great charm. Part drama, part thriller, Irving's 12th novel keeps the reader active because of the long digressions about book critics who spend too much time psychoanalyzing fiction writers (Irving's metagripes?) and the fact that many of Danny's books resemble Irving's. He has us psychoanalyzing anyway-which may be the point. Verdict Irving's latest is interesting, funny, and original-but also self-indulgent and highly digressive, with more backstory than story. If the author weren't so concerned with the minutiae of his characters' lives, this could have been a few hundred pages shorter, probably better, and a whole lot less skeptical of readers' intelligence. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/09.]-Stephen Morrow, Athens, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Under the Logs The young canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long. 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. One of the loggers had reached for the youth's long hair-- the older man's fingers groped around in the frigid water, which was thick, almost soupy, with sloughed- off slabs of bark. Then two logs collided hard on the would- be rescuer's arm, breaking his wrist. The carpet of moving logs had completely closed over the young Canadian, who never surfaced; not even a hand or one of his boots broke out of the brown water. Out on a logjam, once the key log was pried loose, the river drivers had to move quickly and continually; if they paused for even a second or two, they would be pitched into the torrent. In a river drive, death among moving logs could occur from a crushing injury, before you had a chance to drown-- but drowning was more common. From the riverbank, where the cook and his twelve- year- old son could hear the cursing of the logger whose wrist had been broken, it was immediately apparent that someone was in more serious trouble than the would- be rescuer, who'd freed his injured arm and had managed to regain his footing on the flowing logs. His fellow river drivers ignored him; they moved with small, rapid steps toward shore, calling out the lost boy's name. The loggers ceaselessly prodded with their pike poles, directing the floating logs ahead of them. The rivermen were, for the most part, picking the safest way ashore, but to the cook's hopeful son it seemed that they might have been trying to create a gap of sufficient width for the young Canadian to emerge. In truth, there were now only intermittent gaps between the logs. The boy who'd told them his name was "Angel Pope, from Toronto," was that quickly gone. "Is it Angel ?" the twelve- year- old asked his father. This boy, with his dark- brown eyes and intensely serious expression, could have been mistaken for Angel's younger brother, but there was no mistaking the family resemblance that the twelve- year- old bore to his ever- watchful father. The cook had an aura of controlled apprehension about him, as if he routinely anticipated the most unforeseen disasters, and there was something about his son's seriousness that reflected this; in fact, the boy looked so much like his father that several of the woodsmen had expressed their surprise that the son didn't also walk with his dad's pronounced limp. The cook knew too well that indeed it was the young Canadian who had fallen under the logs. It was the cook who'd warned the loggers that Angel was too green for the river drivers' work; the youth should not have been trying to free a logjam. But probably the boy had been eager to please, and maybe the rivermen hadn't noticed him at first. In the cook's opinion, Angel Pope had also been too green (and too clumsy) to be working in the vicinity of the main blade in a sawmill. That was strictly the sawyer's territory-- a highly skilled position in the mills. The planer operator was a relatively skilled position, too, though not particularly dangerous. The more dangerous and less skilled positions included working on the log deck, where logs were rolled into the mill and onto the saw carriage, or unloading logs from the trucks. Before the advent of mechanical loaders, the logs were unloaded by releasing trip bunks on the sides of the trucks-- this allowed an entire load to roll off a truck at once. But the Excerpted from Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.