Last Night at Twisted River by John Irving (Random House; 2009, ISBN 978-1-4000-6384-0)
Cruising in the Caribbean is made for reading. Reading fiction. So, when my wife and I boarded the MS Noordam recently out of Ft. Lauderdale and headed for a much-needed vacation in the sun, I took a stack of books with me to read. One of them was John Irving’s latest novel, Last Night in Twisted River. I was about 2/3 of the way through the book before the Noordam left its moorings. I finished the book a day or so into the voyage. Here’s what I think.
Irving, like other male authors of a certain age (my age or older) has fallen into the trap of reliving his sexual awakening over and over and over again in his fiction. I’m no prude. My first novel, The Legacy, and some of my other writing, includes very explicit scenes of love making. But Irving, along with older male novelists like Jim Harrison, seems to possess, as he ages, a great inner need to recount what its like to experience that first erection, that first touch of a breast. Not once. Not twice. But over and over again. This driving urge, which was the main premise behind Irving’s disaster of a novel, Until I Find You, is omnipresent in his latest work once again.
I’m a great fan of Catcher in the Rye, the quintessential coming-of-age story. I wouldn’t mind it so much if Twisted River recounted the protagonist’s (Danny Angel’s) first, second or even third encounter with love making as an adjunct to a plausible criminal chase story. But the book falls flat not only because of Irving’s infatuating need to continue the sexual retrospections beyond mere repetition; the main gist of the story, that Danny and his father are being pursued by a crazed cop bent on revenge, simply falls flat on its face as a plot device.
Much optimism emerged as I read the first quarter of the book. Irving is a master story teller when he works within a historical context as he does in painting life in a New England logging town in the book’s opening scenes. My optimism dissipated to tedium as the accidental murder-escape scenario emerged to overtake the beginning chapters of this novel. Not as bad as Until I Find You (which I threw away before finishing) this book simply doesn’t measure up to Owen Meany. 2 and 1/2 stars out of 5.
