Master of Disaster by Joanna Scott

Master of Disaster by Joanna Scott

LAST NIGHT IN TWISTED RIVER

By John Irving

554 pp. Random House. $28

John Irving has long been fascinated by the vexed relationship between art and entertainment. In his fourth novel, “The World According to Garp,” he describes the “uncanny half-light” that makes “occasional ‘serious’ books glow, for a time, as also ‘popular’ books.” In his memoir “The Imaginary Girlfriend,” he praises Trollope, Dickens, Vonnegut and Heller, writers whose “popular” books have been treated to “serious” critical attention. While he claims to have no patience for Proust, Conrad or Henry James, he is a fierce defender of Graham Greene, whose reputation as an entertaining writer, Irving maintains, “cost him the critical appreciation that is withdrawn from writers with too many readers.”

Irving’s concern about the status of fiction is central to his new novel, “Last Night in Twisted River.” There are two main characters in the book: an Italian-American cook who at the beginning goes by the name of Dominic Baciagalupo, and his son, Danny, who grows up to be a “world-famous,” “best-selling” author, much like Irving himself. Thanks to Danny’s profession, Irving has an excuse for writing about writing, even as he follows Danny and Dominic through 50 years of complicated adventures.

“It was a world of accidents,” Dominic reflects. The novel opens with the drowning of a young logger who is trying to free a logjam. A surly, coarse, big-hearted older logger named Ketchum breaks his own wrist trying to save him. In the pages that follow, Irving offers the back stories of scores of other accidents associated with logging. We learn that “some rivermen had drowned, or been crushed to death”; a bunkhouse roof had collapsed after a heavy snowfall, killing an Indian; Dominic had broken his ankle as a boy and was maimed for life when he was rolling logs into a mill; and Dominic’s wife — Danny’s mother — had fallen through the ice one night when she’d gone dancing across the frozen river.

In this world of accidents, Dominic and Danny struggle to find steady footing, but like the inexperienced young logger who falls into the river, they keep losing their balance. In their well-meaning effort to protect each other, they make mistakes that are sometimes inevitable, or harmlessly comical or, in the pivotal moment in the novel, fatal.

In Coos County, N.H., 1954, in a logging camp along the Twisted River, Dominic’s mistake is to hide the truth about his affair with an American Indian woman known as “Injun Jane” from his young son. Danny, in his youthful ignorance, walks in on his father and Injun Jane while they’re having sex. Injun Jane, like several other female characters in this novel, is distinguished by her hefty physique and, in particular, her “monumental” breasts. She also has long black hair, which Danny has never before seen unbraided. But she unbraids it that night. When Danny walks into the dark bedroom, drawn by the “violent creaks and moans,” he thinks Injun Jane is a bear attacking his father, and he hits her with an iron skillet. He hits her hard. It’s a big whoops, and it’s used to set the action of the novel in motion. Danny and Dominic will run from this mistake for the rest of their lives.

The scene is obviously improbable, and Injun Jane remains a blank of a character. Readers may not be convinced that this accident deserves to be the propelling event of the book. But there’s more at work than just plot here. At the same time that we are reading about Dominic and Danny as they run from town to town (both of them change their names along the way), we are reading about how, and why, the story came to be written. The narrator tells us, for instance, that “all writers must know how to distance themselves, to detach themselves from this and that emotional moment, and Danny could do this — even at 12.” He tells us that one day “the writer would recognize the near simultaneity of connected but dissimilar momentous events — these are what move a story forward.” He explains that Danny’s novels involve “small, domestic tragedies,” in which “the villain — if there was one — was more often human nature than the United States.” After a section in which the fictional events are intertwined with the events of Sept. 11, Danny comes right out and explains, “I’m a fiction writer — meaning that I won’t ever write about the Sept. 11 attacks, though I may use those events, when they’re not so current, and then only in the context of a story of my own devising.”

Not only does the narrator explain Danny’s methods with unprovocative truisms, he also packages his characters in simplistic generalizations. In case we doubt it, he assures us that “Danny was both observant and smart.” Later on, following a trajectory that will be familiar to readers of some of Irving’s other work, Danny goes to the elite private school Phillips Exeter on a scholarship. Why is he singled out for a scholarship? Because he “simply had a gift for storytelling.” And in a passage that’s supposed to be one of the emotional culminations of the novel, the narrator explains that Danny (now a father himself) “couldn’t change what had happened to his son, the way a fiction writer could revise a novel.”

There’s plenty of evidence of Irving’s agility as a writer in “Last Night in Twisted River.” He is adept at following an accident through its intricate consequences. His evocations of sounds and smells and tactile sensations, especially those provoked by Dominic’s expert cooking, are tantalizing. And some of the comic moments are among the most memorable that Irving has written, including the scene when a naked female skydiver, one of the novel’s many voluptuaries, makes an unfortunate landing smack in the middle of a pigpen.

Given Irving’s skill, it’s especially frustrating to see him working so hard to spell out the import of the fiction. Even if some of the explanations are meant to be inflected with irony (we shouldn’t necessarily believe everything this narrator tells us), they still aren’t convincingly integrated with the events and characters. The coy hints of connections between the author and the narrator have been forced onto a plot that can’t accommodate them, and the fact that Danny is a famous novelist too often seems a mere contrivance, giving Irving a convenient opportunity to include rambling background information and to air his own ideas about writing. In his bid to make something “serious,” Irving has risked distracting readers from what otherwise could be a moving, cohesive story.

Joanna Scott’s most recent book is “Follow Me,” a novel.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/books/review/Scott-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3