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Loading... Last Night in Twisted River: A Novel (original 2009; edition 2010)by John Irving
Work InformationLast Night in Twisted River by John Irving (2009)
  
No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) kevinkevbo | Jul 14, 2023 |   ) JRobinW | Jan 20, 2023 |  ) Castinet | Dec 10, 2022 | Autobiographical features I noticed • Main character is a writer • Has a missing biological parent • Uses a Nom de Plume • Writes the last chapter first • Initial novels were well regarded but not best sellers • Eventually becomes wealthy best selling author and has some books turned into movies • Tries his hand at screenwriting • Attends Exeter • Lived in New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa City and eventually Toronto and has a house in Pointe au Baril • Wrestled • Attends Iowa Writer's workshop and returns there years later to lead workshops • Gets advice from Kurt Vonnegut • Loves writing • Likes to be in control • Sees the world darkly Beyond the autobiographical features there were many features that I've seen before. And I've not read most of his works. Again this list would likely be longer if I had read them all. Features which also appear in other novels by John Irving • Hole/door in the floor, this time it's to a poacher's meat locker • Battered women • Ambiguous interpersonal relations • Nudity • Sex • Oral sex • Abortions • Police, good and bad • Exhibitionists • Tattoos • People reappear after long absences • Bears • Horses • Automobile accidents • Multiple moves • Depression • Suicide • Maiming • Accidents • Tragedy • Things are foreshadowed The story opens in the 1950's in a remote logging camp on Twisted River. In a preventable accident an unprepared teenager disappears under logs on the river. While the boy is only a minor character his death permeates the story for decades. We quickly meet the real central characters, another young boy who eventually becomes a writer, the stand in for John Irving, and his father, a cook with an Italian background. One night the young boy awakes hearing noises in his father's room. He's small and from his perspective it looks to him as his father is being devoured by a bear. He grabs what he knows will discourage bears, a skillet hanging on the wall. He swings at the bear's head only to realize it's not a bear, it's his nurse he dearly loves, Injun Jane, who was secretly his father's lover. Too late. She's dead. Now we know where the title of the book comes from. Unfortunately Injun Jane was also living with the local drunken cop who beat her on a regular basis. Now the die is set. The story becomes the multi-decade attempt to run away from the drunken cop who will eventually learn why these two high tailed it out of town the same day Injun Jane turned up dead in his apartment. It's more complex than that but I don't want to give away everything. In a sense the entire story is a morality play, you can't run away from major decisions you made even if they were years ago. You will eventually be held accountable. We watch the central characters relocate and re-invent themselves multiple times to avoid the drunken killer cop. Sometimes they rename themselves, they become involved with new women only to have to pull up stakes and immediately relocate themselves breaking all ties including their romantic relations. The cook even changes the type of food he cooks, Italian, Chinese, French etc. Permanent relationships are not possible. Eventually the drunken cop figures out where they went. The story unfolds in snippets, chapters that weave back and forth in time as characters and locales disappear and reappear. Irving plants hints all along the way. Story lines are left hanging only to be picked up later. Every once in a while you recognize something from a long past chapter. A minor event now makes sense many pages later. Irving has clearly crafted a story, decided whether at what point he will reveal something and show us whether the character decided to go to the left or to the right. He's clearly worked out several alternative paths in his vast imagination and some must have been left on the cutting room floor. Irving also demonstrates he's mastered many things, how logging camps worked, how restaurants work, how hunter's work, etc. As the cuisine changed Irving was still a master of what the cook was cooking. By page 430 the story appears to come to what we were waiting for. The cop has discovered them in Toronto and kills the cook and is killed by the son. The only problem is we've still got more than a hundred pages to go. Out of nowhere we learn about 9/11 and how it impacted the story. And a minor character comes out of the long ago to rescue the son who just was going nowhere. Personally I would have loved it if this had ended closer to page 430. I would have given it five stars if it had ended there. Still glad I read it. ( ) Ed_Schneider | Oct 20, 2022 | a) why irving thought all that excruciating detail about logging at the beginning was necessary. b) why so many of his recent books seem to use the violent death of women as inciting incidents. sigh. p 410: this is all tell, no show. i couldn't finish this. i got to what seemed like the exciting climax and there was still 100 pages to go. that's fucked up. so i choose to claim that the book ends where i stopped, because i couldn't really see where it was going after that, nor why i would want to follow it there. i will say that the character of ketchum is really fucking interesting, but not interesting enough to warrant my ... interest. in the rest of the book, that is. this book is so boring that it's made me boring. sigh. J.Flux | Aug 13, 2022 |
 The coy hints of connections between the author and the narrator have been forced onto a plot that can’t accommodate them, and the fact that Danny is a famous novelist too often seems a mere contrivance, giving Irving a convenient opportunity to include rambling background information and to air his own ideas about writing. In his bid to make something “serious,” Irving has risked distracting readers from what otherwise could be a moving, cohesive story. I thought I was heading for another “The Cider House Rules,” my personal favorite of his novels. But the full reading experience ended up being more like “A Widow for One Year,” where one outstanding section has to carry the weight of the whole book. And at 554 pages, that’s a lot to carry.  Irving playfully invents a story that’s as much about the pleasures of reading one of his novels as it is anything else, until it poignantly turns into a paean for a dying art and a plea for the idea of the story. This could all seem self-indulgent. Instead, it’s Irving’s best since the ’80s.  Irving's story is engrossing, and he gives us a satisfying assortment of fully realized characters: Carl, a cruel, ignorant police officer; Ketchum, a hard-drinking, violent logger who devotes himself to protecting the cook and his son and whose favorite exclamation is “Constipated Christ!”; Six-Pack Pam, whose name pretty much says it all; and Lady Sky, the aforementioned parachutist, who becomes the love of the cook's son's life. Mr. Irving uses coincidences, cliffhanger chapter endings and other 19th-century novelistic devices to hook the reader, while at the same time orchestrating them to underscore the improbable, random nature of real life. Some of his inventions — like a murderous blue car that appears to have zeroed in on Danny’s son — are ludicrous at first glance, but the reader gradually comes to understand that they are writerly metaphors for the precarious nature of life in “a world of accidents.”
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. A tale that spans five decades. No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumJohn Irving's book Last Night in Twisted River was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers.  Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.77)
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