Last Night In Twisted River — Learning From Mistakes
Sepia brown, that’s New Hampshire’s north country in 1954, still dominated by lumber camps, river logging drives, and the dictates of a formidable climate. Southern New Englanders seeking refuge and Catholic French Canadians seeking work clash with ornery, primitive locals and the hard working and harder living in the live free or die state climaxes every Saturday night.
While the town slept off its Saturday night hangover on Easter Sunday Morning, the father, Cookie, and the son, Danny, fish out the body of the young man, Angel, who drowned driving logs down the river on Good Friday. That afternoon they’ll take Angel’s wallet back to his mother in Boston’s North End. Cookie and Danny won’t return to Twisted River, they’ve chosen to run from their troubles, but this seems like the right day to be born again and the North End feels like Providence.
Through the soft light of the sepia film, Irving introduces us to colorful characters and sets the stage for a chase that twists and turns over the next half century. This is Irving at his best and he’s still dealing when he shifts the story to Boston’s Italian North End neighborhood in the crackling color of 1967.
By 1967, Cookie has settled into a comfortably working class life amongst his extended Italian family. He’s doing what he loves: cooking at a restaurant. So far, they’ve been safe since they ran out of Twisted River. Danny’s grown up, gone to college, published a novel, and settled into a comfortable teaching job in a southern Vermont liberal arts college. It’s going to get uncomfortable.
Just as school gets out for the summer in North End, a north-country man in a flannel shirt with the selves torn off, carries in one bag what is obviously a shotgun and another duffel bag of what looks like ammunition. He’s spotted proceeding down the North End streets towards Cookie’s restaurant. Most of the staff knew this day would come, it’s Ketchum. Ketchum is like Danny’s second dad, he’s come to take Cookie on the run again.
Ketchum’s recently ex-live-in girlfriend, Six-Pack Pam, is now Constable’s Carl’s. Constable Carl is whom Cookie has been hiding from, Cookie slept with Carl’s old gal, Injun Jane (another colorful character). Since Six Pack has been reading all of Danny’s letters to Ketchum, a closet illiterate, Six-Pack knows where Cookie is, she’ll tell Carl. The Boston section ends with a showdown scene, but death dose not come.
By 1983 the color has less crackle, but blurs a bit on the TV screen that picks up part three. While crunchy granola Vermont is the on the other end of the political spectrum from the libertarian northwoods of the alcohol-tax-free state, physically, it’s just other side of the river or a wrong exit on I-91. As per Checkov, the inevitable chance meeting happens, forcing father and son on the road again. Turn the page, because someone should have died here.
Southern Vermont is the third part of a six part novel, but like a Shakespearean tragicomedy, the novel should have been five parts. Instead of part three being the climax, the reader has to go through all of part four.
Part four is the year 2000 in Toronto. It’s been too long for the narrative and for all these hard living characters from 1954, who are depicted as surprisingly still of able body and mind. While, I’ve found the location of the first three New England parts to be full of their unique character and ascetic, Toronto feels anesthetic. The writing here follows the location and there are no new memorable characters. While Irving poignantly illustrates Danny’s son, Joe, at two-years-old and again at eight, Irving tells instead of shows Joe as a young adult. He tries to return later to the scene, but paints an even less believable, cliché scene that doesn’t work. Irving fails to develop a third generation, the novel’s second flaw.
Part four could be the falling action, but the climax hasn’t happened. Parts five and six are two versions of the closing. It’s just too long, too repetitive, too sentimental. In the new millennium, the picture’s resolution is much sharper, the mistakes appear in high definition, and the political references jump the shark.
However, there’s still some good writing here. This is the passage that gives the book it’s cover:
From his new writing shack, Danny could see a pine tree that had been shaped by the wind; it was bent at almost a right angle to itself. When new snow was falling and there were near whiteout conditions — so that where the rocks on shore ended and the frozen bay began were all one — it struck Danny Angel that the little tree had a simultaneously tenacious and precarious grip on its own survival….
“Do you see that tree Ketchum?” ….”What does it remind you of?”
“Your dad,” Ketchum told him without hesitation. “That tree’s got Cookie written all over it, but it’ll be fine, Danny — like your dad. Cookie’s going to be fine.”
Part four bores because there’s no climax in part three. Not pulling the trigger at the end of part two, adds to the complication and suspense, but not even Irving can hold the narrative’s drive over another long section and sixteen-year sweep.
Given the fifty year sweep, the novel needs a third generation. My favorite novel, Absalom, Absalom, sweeps fifty years from 1860 to 1910, but features three developed generations. I don’t expect a masterpiece, but Irving, like us all, can learn from them. It’s not just Faulkner, there’s a biblical antecedent. The Jesus story is thirty three years and has two generations, but in the David story, David became king when he was 30 and reigned for 40 years, that story has three generations. Without Saul’s overzealous jealousness, David wouldn’t have taken the throne over Jonathan’s dead body and without David’s children, there’d be no Solomon and no Absalom.
Though Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom story travels half a century, he ends it a quarter century before its 1936 publication. Thus maintaining that historical, look back feel. Since Irving travels right up to the present, the final three sections feel too close, too bright and lure Irving into the trap of referencing recent political events that don’t fit. (Faulkner over politicizes too like in Intruder in the Dust and the problem with political references is that they have a short shelf life.) For example, Irving has Ketchum complain about how the Supreme Court stole the 2000 election, but the sixties section doesn’t mention how Joe Kennedy bought his son the 1960 election with dead people voting in Chicago, after 2016 who cares? The off-key political references are the fourth flaw in the novel.
The extra sections and sweep leads to Irving repeating the same devices and tropes and since The World According to the Garp shares many similarities with Last Night Twisted River, its all the more repetitive.
Learn from mistakes
When I think of Toronto, I think of Mitch Williams giving up that home run to Joe Carter, but it wasn’t just one pitch, there was a whole setup before that. Likewise, it’s not just a bad delivery in Toronto for Irving, but failing to deliver before that. Looking at it in another way, there’s no turning point in the middle, this extends the novel another twenty years, but there’s no third generation, and the extra 20 years leads it too close the present, losing the look back feel. The bildungsroman, the commming of age novel is 18 to 30 years and typically has two generations, the longer narrative sweeps are family sagas that require a minimum of three generations. There’s no common narrative structure for a 63 year-old artist’s comming of age novel and there’s not enough family for a saga. Last Night In Twisted River, doesn’t fit into a common genre or structure and it’s not inventive enough to stand without these basic conventions.
Irving’s storytelling and character building, which he does mainly through spot-on dialogue, makes the first three sections a great read. Irving builds a few endearing characters and then does awful things to them. However, he doesn’t add to the body count he starts in part one until too much later in part four and he doesn’t continue building the third generation he started in part two. This causes the narrative force to dissipate. The Easter Tritium is death and rebirth, it compresses winter and spring into one weekend, it taps into our collective consciousness, that’s power. This novel misses that.
If you’re happy to it make the World Series, read this book, but if you’re only interested in wining it all, then don’t.
Other Reads and Reviews
- The World According Garp — still the best John Irving novel.
- Blue Angel — a novel in five acts, with a political critique that works.
- Absalom, Absalom — the best.
