Nicole Dancel

Famed novelist John Irving has been thinking about his new book for 20 years

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John Irving presented by WordFest
Calgary Public Library - Central Branch
Wednesday, October 21 - Wednesday, October 21

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Last Night in Twisted River is a detailed, sprawling novel covering 60 years of the lives of a father, Dominic, and son, Danny, on the run from a crazed small-town cop. It is pure John Irving — bits of autobiographical touches and eccentric characters — but it’s not bizarre. Don’t call it bizarre.

“I feel that there’s a lot of supportive detail in my novels that makes even the most ‘out there’ characters entirely credible and believable,” says Irving as he picks at a clubhouse sandwich at the Palliser Hotel. He doesn’t like it when people refer to his stories as weird.

“I think the only reason you label that bizarre is that you haven’t invested enough time in the details that have created those characters.”

Irving isn’t sure what people do in their lives if they think violence, strange sex and bears — recurring elements in his novels, including this one — are abnormal. “What world do these people live in? Have they never had weird sex? Have they never turned on the news and seen, oh gosh, violence? What are they thinking? Do they live on the same planet that I do?”

There are autobiographical elements in this book, including the writer Danny and his varying similarities with Irving’s life. Irving fans will also recognize elements in Twisted River from his other works, such as the bear, of course, but also psychological constructs that the author inserts into many of his novels — his archetypes. There’s the father who fears losing his child and the large, sexually aggressive, intimidating older woman (or, in this case, women). There’s Hester in A Prayer for Owen Meany, there’s Melanie in The Cider House Rules, there’s Emma in Until I Find You and, in this novel, there’s Injun Jane, Six Pack Pam and Lady Sky.

“It would be logical to assume that I must have known someone like this but… I never knew anyone like that,” says Irving. “But it tells me something about myself: That if I’ve invented this character, who is virtually the same character, or who plays the same role in four novels, I must have wished that I had known someone like that. I also think that’s revealing in a personal or autobiographical way.”

Twisted River is broken up into different times and places in the characters’ lives, it takes mighty leaps of many years and teases you with what’s to come. The same attention to detail and patience required to write this book is also asked of the reader. The present is punctuated by memories and reflections and a backstory is offered before the plot makes forward strides. As the novel progresses, the jumps in time become shorter, quickening the pace.

This is a novel about time, about its relentless march forward and how the characters have brief, exclusive moments when they are given the opportunities to influence their own narrative. “My hope was that at every junction in the road of that kind, and there are many, that the reader is kind of saying ‘Oh God, just do it,’” says Irving. It is a looping narrative where, without giving away the story, the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. It helps that whenever Irving plots a storyline, he figures out the first and last sentences and makes a roadmap for his stories before he begins to write.

But there isn’t a life lesson here.

“I don’t think I’m much of a message writer,” he says. “I think that, more important to me than what the story is about, or what its message is, is the completeness of the construction. How well the story is built, how well it is constructed, how it comes back on itself is probably the most matterful thing to me.”

One of the most endearing characters in the novel is Ketchum, a rugged and ragged old logger who has a tight bond with Dominic and Danny. He’s a radical libertarian with a penchant for violence and a soft heart who seems to represent an image of America.

“Well, I don’t know that I really answer that question so much as I raise it. The whole violence-begets-violence thing could be seen as a parallel of America’s kind of cowboy diplomacy,” says Irving.

“Whatever you think of violence or reciprocity or taking vengeance, whatever one thinks of that, I tried, in the case of this story, to create this single-minded guy in the cop who, really, it would have been better if somebody had shot him.”

But if the characters seized the opportunities to save themselves and those around them, it wouldn’t be much of a story, would it?