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Loading... Last Night in Twisted River: A Novel (original 2009; edition 2010)by John Irving
Work detailsLast Night in Twisted River by John Irving (2009)
 BookishJoJo | Apr 2, 2013 |  Any John Irving book is good - I love his perspective - but this is probably my least favorite of all the Irving books I've read so far. The story felt self-congratulatory in places (lots of name dropping) and the recursive path of the story was disconcerting. I can get behind starting at the end of the story and working back, or at the beginning and working forward, but this book mixed the two. Also, by the time I got there, I knew what the end of the story was going to be. Sometimes knowing how things will end is okay, since learning how the author is going to get you there can be fun, but not with this book. Please see that I gave this 3 stars. Still a good story. Still John Irving. But if you've always been curious about John Irving's books and are wondering where to start, take the advice of someone who has read lots of his works: don't start with Last Night in Twisted River. (  ) Jessica_Olin | Apr 1, 2013 | Good book. I have some trouble to get my thoughts about it organised, because there are so many things happening and yet not much is happening in the book. The book tells me about the life of a man and his son and all people they come in contact with throughout their lives. Sometimes long encounters, sometimes short ones, sometimes pleasant, sometimes less pleasant ones. I liked to read how the circle is round again at the end of the book. (Will, of course not tell you how: that would only spoil the fun for others.) With flashbacks and flash forwards, the story is told, from varying points of view, but in general it is a chronological story. Normally I hate the 'and they lived happily ever after' endings in a book, but in this case it was okay. Something the writer Danny wishes for, looks forward to his entire life comes true, but in the light of the story that was already a bit strange that was just a natural outcome. (  ) BoekenTrol71 | Mar 31, 2013 | Lange nicht gelesen John Irving und wieder sehr genossen, Es gibt keine Zufälle alles ist im Fluß. Schräg, skurril liebevoll...ein Irving halt! (  ) BauerG | Feb 15, 2013 | "Scratch" wrote a review saying that this book had the "Same rehashed themes as all his other books." That may be true, but I am now 20 years older than I was when I read one of his books, and it seemed different, but maybe that is because I am different. Proves to me even more why rereading books can be good. ( ) davevanl | Dec 19, 2012 |
 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.”
References to this work on external resources.
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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.… (more)
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Wikipedia in English (3)
I just finished reading your new book, Last Night in Twisted River. I enjoy your writing style very much and your layers of storytelling have always been amazing to me. I do have to ask you something difficult, though.
I have had this hope, each time I hear of a new John Irving book being released, that THIS time I am going to be totally surprised by how and where you have taken us as readers. My only wish is for you to really break out of you Exeter/wrestling/boys&mothers box. You do this group of themes so well, and have shown that time and again. In fact, in your new novel you rail against authors who do the same thing by "writing what they know". You can understand my confusion.
In Last Night in Twisted River, the (very)thinly veiled references to almost every book you have ever published, peppered throughout this novel, is a bit disconcerting. Along with a few badly cloaked allusions to some of your personal, real life events I am left worried your creative well is getting depleted. We readers know you KNOW this stuff ~ your comfort zone, your heart.
Please Mr. Irving, something different next time? I know you have the talent to pull off the absolutely unexpected and render the reading world gob-smacked! I still heart you and still give the novel 4 stars!
Sincerely,
Jennifer
Okay, so before the book has to go back to the library, I pulled out a couple of quotes that stood out for me.
A)"Ketchum meant that someone should have killed Ralph Nader. (Gore would have beaten Bush in Florida if Nader hadn't played the spoiler role.) Ketchum believed that Ralph Nader should be bound and gagged - "preferably, in a child's defective car seat" - and sunk in the Androscoggin."
Okay, this just made me laugh out loud, picturing it.
B)"Danny Angel's fiction had been ransacked for every conceivable autobiographical scrap; his novels had been dissected and overanalyzed for whatever could be construed as the virtual memoirs hidden inside them. But what did Danny expect? In the media, real life was more important that fiction; those elements of a novel that were, at least, based on personal experience were of more interest to the general public that those pieces of the novel-writing process that were "merely" made up."
C) "That kind of question drove Danny Angel crazy, but he expected too much from journalists; most of them lacked the imagination to believe that anything credible in a novel had been "wholly imagined." And those former journalists who later turned to writing fiction subscribed to that tiresome Hemingway dictum of writing about what you know. What bullshit was this? Novels should be about the people you know? How many boring but deadeningly realistic novels ca be attributed to this lame and utterly uninspired advice?"
D) "Dysfunctional families; damaging sexual experiences; various losses of innocence, all leading to regret. These stories were small, domestic tragedies - none of them condemnations of society or government. In Danny Angel's novels the villain - if there was one - was more often human nature..."
Funny how my tongue-in-cheek letter, above, can be addressed with passages from the novel. These quotations were all taken from the same time in the book, covering pages 372 through 377.
Hmmmmm. (