Nostalgic reading John Irving again

Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Like many people, I first discovered John Irving with The World According to Garp. After that, I went back and read all his previous novels, and then started reading new works as they came out. What made Irving special to me was his ability to write fun, intricate stories that made you think. They were both enjoyable and rich with passion and meaning.

John Irving makes no secret of his love for Charles Dickens, and his novels capture the spirit of the master novelist like no contemporary novelist that I know. Like Dickens, Irving could be faulted for the intricate potting, the crazy coincidences, and the sprawling casts of fairly one-dimensional characters. None of these bother me when done well. I feel that if an author exaggerates something to prove a point, there's nothing wrong with that.

That said, the best of these sorts of novels breeze along so quickly that you don't tend to think about these things while you're reading. You think about the injustices in society that the author is working to shine a light on. John Irving's particular talent is for creating a rich, warm world of quirky characters that you feel nostalgic for even if you've never been there yourself.

After A Prayer for Owen Meany, Irving continued to create such worlds, but I found that the books were starting to meander and the characters becoming forgettable. At some point I stopped reading them; sadly, I can't even remember which was the last one I read in full.

I picked up Last Night in Twisted River because I read that it was something of a return to form. It is somewhat, and I read it with a warm nostalgia for past masterpieces. Irving has created a rich world that spans decades and many different places. I enjoyed it overall, but there are some aspects that keep it from being a great novel.

The first is that the main character is just as sketchily drawn as much of the supporting cast. After sixty-some years and hundreds of pages with Danny, I can't say I have much of idea of who he is. He's partly autobiographical, and that might be the problem. There's a wall behind which we never see. We're told he loves people, but we don't really see or feel it. Mostly, we see his sense of loss, not what drives him forward.

The other things that kept me from enjoying the novel were the inconsistent ways both the settings and people were drawn. Some places and situations were rich and detailed; some were grotesque sketches that were meant to be funny but missed the mark or even bordered on offensive. Characters were treated in the same way, with some minor characters warmly and painstakingly drawn and others that proved to be very important marked by little more than physical characteristics or linguistic quirks. There was no rhyme or reason to this.

As a writer, I've long been puzzled by the question of character and caricature. Dickens is often criticized for his caricatures, but I find in life that while everyone may have depth beyond what you see on the surface, they can behave as caricatures in society. The magic of Dickens and Irving at their best is that they are able to capture the essence of a person in just a couple of sentences. You can see the caricature but understand the person beneath. There's an art and a finesse in this that Irving has done a lot better in the past.

Lastly, I missed the kind of driving force that propelled my favorite novels by Irving. This book seems to be about the power of stories to shape lives and how that (view spoiler)[makes Danny become a writer. But the power of story is important in all our lives, from childhood to old age. There's really nothing here that convinces you why Danny had to become a novelist, as he seems to believe. In the end, this book is a kind of meditation on how long and tough life is, and how we keep soldiering on. Nothing wrong with that, but many episodes here, including the end, are forced and unconvincing. This author has been a lot more insightful and powerful in past work. (hide spoiler)]

Still, I enjoyed Last Night in Twisted River, and if you're an Irving fan, you'll feel right at home here.



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