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Last Night in Twisted River (Hardcover)

by John Irving (Author)
3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
RRP: £20.00
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 576 pages
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (19 Oct 2009)
  • ISBN-10: 1408801841
  • ISBN-13: 978-1408801840
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16 x 5.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 326 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #1 in  Books > Fiction > 20th Century Classics > Irving, John
    #3 in  Books > Fiction > By Period > 20th Century
    #18 in  Books > Fiction > Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards

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Product Description

Review

`An emotional authority that recalls The Cider House Rules and a plot every bit as disquieting as that of his 1978 breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp ... It's a page-turner in the smartest possible sense, written with the historical authenticity and taut command of language that has established Irving as one of America's greatest living novelists' --GQ

`A master-class'
--Independent

`Nothing less than show-stopping' --Guardian

`Irving fans will relish this action-packed tale of father-and-son runaways'
--Sunday Times

`The most poetic and powerful of Irving's work to date' --Independent on Sunday

`Last Night in Twisted River is a big, old-fashioned novel in the best sense; Irving has created in painstaking, loving detail a whole and complete world, a record of momentous social changes, but, above all a testament to the enduring power of love and fiction'
--Observer


Product Description

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. In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River - John Irving's twelfth novel - depicts the recent half-century in the United States as 'a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course'. From the novel's taut opening sentence - 'The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long' - to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the historical authenticity and emotional authority of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is also as violent and disturbing a story as John Irving's breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp. What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author's unmistakable voice - the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller. Near the end of this moving novel, John Irving writes: 'We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly - as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth - the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives'.
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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Up there with his very best, 24 Oct 2009
By Sussex by the Sea (England) - See all my reviews
  
I've been enjoying John Irving's novels for well over twenty years, but found his previous book (Until I Find You) unengaging. "Last Night in Twisted River" is, by contrast, a magnificent work that is absolutely up there with the best books John Irving has written.

The novel begins with a straightforward story, set in the logging camps of the great north woods in 1954. The subsequent sections divide up the years between then and 2005, and each continue the story, but not in a linear or expected direction. At times this can be disconcerting, and new information about the events of the previous chapters forces the reader to reinterpret the on-going story: I often found myself re-reading earlier sections in light of later discoveries.

The themes may superficially be familiar to John Irving readers, but it is not a re-treading of old ground. The tone of the book is about halfway between the exuberance of The World According to Garp, and the melancholy of A Widow for One Year, leaning slightly towards the later. If Garp is the story of youth to middle-age, then this novel can be seen as adding another half a life on top of that. The tendency of the novel to place crucial information unexpectedly in the middle of a paragraph can be emotionally shocking, particularly in the twelfth chapter. Many parts of the book are very moving.

While the book can easily be enjoyed purely for the story and characterisation, it also can be enjoyed for the playful way it shows the art of the novelist, particularly when it demonstrates how complex events can be turned into a simpler narrative: at the end you will certainly want to read the first chapter again.

Full of themes of identity, containing aspects of the social history of the last fifty years in North America, and with more recipes than a cookbook, it is a mammoth work - and one that lives up to the standards that John Irving set for himself in his novels of the 1980s. It's good to have him back on top form.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars I, 15 Nov 2009
By moonstone (ireland) - See all my reviews
Oh my God, I thought I'd never finish this. Now I've read nearly all of his books, having been hooked early on by Garp. But at this stage i have to admit to myself that I'm just not enjoying them any more.

My main problems with this book are:

THE PLOT: It's not at all gripping. Look away now if you don't want to read spoilers. A small boy accidentally kills his father's girlfriend. They go on the run and live in a few different cities. The boy grows up and has a son. The dead woman's boyfriend meanders through the book trying (not too hard) to find them. Whole years pass without anything of note happening. Why the hell does he need 525 pages for a plot like this? In Garp, the story continually evolves, introducing new and interesting characters at breakneck speed. Here, it's just the same 4 or 5 characters doing not very much at all.

THE WRITING: Talk about overwritten. Irving practically wants to read the story TO us, not allowing us to interact with the story in our own right. He stresses or italicises practically every 5th word. Thanks John but I learned to read a long time ago and I'm more than capable of figuring out what words are important all by myself. And the mindless, repetitive use of parentheses to over explain EVERY LITTLE UNIMPORTANT detail is infuriating. It's like he knows the plot is crap and so tries to bamboozle us with detail, in the hope (clearly successful from reading the above reviews) that people will think it's really well-written stuff. It isn't. The pages and pages of explaining the origins of Italian names and place names, the paragraphs upon paragraphs describing the different ingredients in his kitchen - someone tell me why that's good writing. Please. Because I can't figure it out. I could just as easily write 15 pages listing all the different shapes I could make with my Lego collection - is that good writing?

THE CHARACTERS: You'd think with a book this long we'd really get to know the characters but we don't. The boy-murderer is suddenly grown up and married with a child (which involves another torturous back story by the way)and Dominic just grows older and more tetchy. Ketchum is a 2-dimensional larger-than-life (ie totally unrealistic) friend and protector to the family. I think we're meant to like him, I don't know why anyone would.

So save your money folks and buy Garp and Owen Meaney instead.

P.S. It's a little sad to see how predictable Irving has become over the years; Missing limbs, limps, deformities etc - not EVERYONE in the world has a physical disability.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Another Irving classic, 15 Nov 2009
By inthesneck (Inverness, Scotland) - See all my reviews
About a third of the way into the novel and all the Irving ingredients are there, memorable characters (Nick Nolte to play Ketchum - Steve Buscemi as Dominic?) and a storyline which only Irving could come up with. The description of people and place is again pure Irving. The loggers cook house reminds me of an oil rig bulders mess I once ate at at Loch Kishorn back in the seventies. I'm really looking forward to seeing how it all turns out for these souls negotiating "a world of accidents". I found 'Until I Find You' a bit less accessible but this has the warmth and emotion of 'The Fourth Hand'.
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