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As I carefully open David A. Carter’s engaging new pop-up book, “White Noise,” I’m relieved my son is now 20 years old. If he were a small child, it would quickly become a heap of torn shreds. It’s hard enough for an ambidextrous adult like me not to tear its intricate feats of paper engineering after flipping through it a dozen times, which is what the book demands. This must be why the publisher calls it “A Classic Collectible Pop-Up”: If it survives the wear and tear of the pawing child and adult, it will indeed become a collector’s item.
Each book in the series, which began in 2005 with “One Red Dot,” has been a celebration not only of color, but of the power of abstract art to pique the imagination.
When my son was younger I bought him all of Carter’s pop-up bug books, which are magical. But the entire color series is more than mere pop-up entertainment — particularly “White Noise,” which is a laptop sculpture garden, a romp through cubism and futurism, and a lesson in early-20th-century modernist formalism.
Each spread, designed to make crackly, crinkly, creaky, tinkling or snapping noises as the pages are turned, evokes children’s construction-paper cutouts. As sophisticated as the mechanics are, the primary colors and seemingly random tangles of “bits and pieces,” as one page describes them, combine in such imperfect forms that they give the illusion that anyone could make this book. My favorite pair of pages, labeled “Sir Anthony’s easel and Munari’s white noise,” is a Miró-esque three-dimensional painting. The Munari reference, incidentally, is to Bruno Munari, the Italian Futurist and pioneer of interactive children’s books. (I don’t know who Sir Anthony is, but I’m sure he’s worthy.)
Carter’s creations are akin to fireworks displays, each building in pyrotechnical intensity until the most impressive burst at the end. Although the “rainbow bubble blast,” which starts the book with different-size circles exploding from the page, is by no means modest, the ambitious last pop-up, “Sierra Nevada chopsticks,” reaches an even more remarkably noisy finale. In between, Carter plays with lollipop swirls and wings that sound like a distant flock of birds.
Besides the joy bestowed by Carter’s fancy, “White Noise” comes with two not-so-hidden agendas. It proves that exuberant, nonrepresentational art can be just as thought-provoking as realistic art, and, most important, that print and paper can be as much fun as a computer game, if not more so. Who said print is dead?
One caution to parents: Don’t fold, spindle or mutilate before the children get their turn.
Steven Heller writes the Visuals column for the Book Review.
It’s hard to imagine how a doughboy from World War I might react to an air-conditioned trailer, dinner catered by KBR or a suicide car bomb. Technology, culture and information have changed warfare right along with other aspects of life. Despite the differences between the experiences of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and those in previous conflicts, one thing remains constant: the young — on all sides — endure a disproportionate share of the fighting and suffering. Patricia McCormick’s novel “Purple Heart” promises to tell that story by plunging her readers into the struggle of one 18-year-old American soldier as he wobbles under the weight of his experience.
The novel follows Matt Duffy as he recovers from a brain injury that affected his memory and left him unconscious in an Army hospital in Baghdad. McCormick speeds his recovery, and the reader’s introduction to Iraq, with high-fact, low-dosage packets of information delivered by doctors, other soldiers and fragmented flashbacks. Justin, one of his squadmates, explains that he dragged his friend out of an alleyway after Duffy was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade. Duffy himself can recall only one thing: Ali, a young Iraqi boy, rising into the “crayon-blue sky” after being shot at the end of the alley.
A soldier’s recovery of memory is fertile ground for the big themes of the Iraq war, and McCormick plants plenty of them in the book. Children are both fighters and victims. Conflicting interests distort the many faces of truth and morality. Diverse forces propel people into war, but their initial justifications rarely withstand the experience. To her credit, she is evenhanded and mostly avoids political messages, though she loses something in the balancing act. As Duffy sets out to search for the truth, each new fact compels him to rearrange his account of what happened, but the mission diverts attention from his struggle to reconcile his experiences.
Once back on patrol, Duffy gets a chance to examine the alley where he was wounded. Bullet holes in the wall seem to shift responsibility for Ali’s death to his friend Justin; on the other hand, the boy himself might be implicated. Duffy reels with an epiphany: Maybe Ali had aided the enemy, but he would have been valuable to them only because he was friends with the Americans, and the Americans had befriended him only because they wanted to help. Duffy’s good intentions had put both Ali and his own squad in danger. This staccato self-reflection, delivered at the end of a tidily twisted plot, captures a reality of the Iraq war, but seems to leave the young soldier unaffected.
Floating Duffy along on top of the hefty universals also leaves less room for the kind of small treasures that are the book’s real strength. I was deployed in Iraq in 2003 and 2005, and thought McCormick was at her best on the daily frustrations of the environment. I wanted to read aloud to my mother the perfect renderings of banal phone conversations between the combat zone and the home front, made awkward by delays in the line and the weight of everything that’s inexpressible, to explain why I rarely called. When Duffy’s girlfriend writes to him about an upcoming quiz, “OMG! I hate bio,” he can’t quite muster the sincerity to write back about the alleyway, his injury and the dead boy.
In these moments, when Duffy is left staring across the gulf between his experience and the life at home he volunteered to protect, we catch a glimpse of how war doesn’t so much mature young people as it detaches them from their youth.
Ryan Southerland, a student at StanfordLawSchool, is a former platoon leader in the United States Army.
440 pp. Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing. $19.99. (Ages 12 and up)
Scott Westerfeld’s “Leviathan” is a tightly paced young adult novel set in an alternate version of the First World War and a welcome addition to the steampunk genre: a neo-retro period adventure. Just as cyberpunk reimagined science fiction with computers, steampunk reinvents it through a fantasy of the technological past. Its signature style is a whimsical Jules Verne-ian 19th-century take on high technology — gadgets, gauges and goggles take the place of circuits and fusion reactors. Its genteel heroes and heroines display both the pluck of idealized Victorian adventurers and their understanding of formal dress.
Westerfeld is best known for his sci-fi Uglies series (“Pretties,” “Specials,” “Extras,” etc.), about a future society in which people have a surgical procedure at age 16 that makes their faces beautiful but their minds frivolous and easily controlled. “Leviathan” is different. If it poses a big question, that question would be, Wouldn’t it be cool if the First World War had been fought with genetically engineered mutant animals, against steam-powered walking machines like the ones from “The Empire Strikes Back”? And the answer is, Yes, it would.
The book begins the night the Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated and his son, Aleksandar, flees his home near Prague to escape being made a target or a tool as the potential heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. (Aleksandar is an invention, but like Ferdinand’s real children, he is not a fully legitimate heir to royal lands or titles, since his mother has “common blood.”) At the other end of Europe, a working-class Scottish girl named Deryn disguises herself as a boy to join the British Air Service. Intrigue and political instability sweep the teenagers out of their normal lives and into a world at war.
It’s not quite our world. In this version of history, Europe is divided between two rival technological cultures, a Mac-versus-PC contest on a geopolitical scale. The British, the “Darwinists,” have mastered the science of bioengineering. The Central European powers are the “Clankers,” and they use airplanes, zeppelins and walking machines that tramp through forests and fields. (We aren’t told what the French do, and I think that’s for the best.)
“Leviathan” shines when it lets us inhabit these cultures. British society is permeated by its signature technology, an inventive living infrastructure of a thousand elements, from lizards that can mimic and record voices to tigerlike beasts of burden to the leviathan of the title, a living dirigible grown on the genetic chassis of a whale. This marvelous creature makes a lovely entrance:
“The Leviathan’s body was made from the life threads of a whale, but a hundred other species were tangled into its design, countless creatures fitting together like the gears of a stopwatch. . . . The motivator engines changed pitch, nudging the creature’s nose up. The airbeast obeyed, cilia along its flanks undulating like a sea of grass in the wind — a host of tiny oars rowing backward, slowing the Leviathan almost to a halt. The huge shape drifted slowly overhead, blotting out the sky.”
Westerfeld’s imagery is enhanced by Keith Thompson’s old-fashioned black-and-white illustrations, which lend an extra dimension of reality to this world. And the Darwinist and Clanker jargon crackles with an authentically techie feel. Who wouldn’t want to go up in a “Huxley ascender” or pilot a “Wotan-class land frigate”? If Westerfeld has a signature foible, however, it’s a weakness for vintage slang that ends up being more distracting than colorful. No amount of repetition made “Barking spiders!” feel like a natural exclamation.
I also wanted to like Deryn and Alek more. There’s something a little mechanical (or bioengineered?) about this pair; they resemble something called a “young adult protagonist” more than they do actual teenagers. It’s not that they’re not pleasant to be around, and each one passes a dramatic series of trials, overseen by a mysterious British lady scientist and a cranky Teutonic fencing master who both possess a charisma that makes you miss them when they’re offstage. Deryn and Alek lack the psychological sloppiness that makes for a living presence rather than an expert piece of craft. Where their feelings are concerned, the prose is a little vacant, as if scrubbed of the messiest and most personal aspects of growing up.
And then there’s the unpleasantness of fighting in World War I. The Great War in “Leviathan” is a little too picturesque, a little too much of a lark. As novels like “The Red Badge of Courage” show, it’s possible to reach young readers without editing out the catastrophe and confusion of wartime.
This isn’t to say that “Leviathan” is a superficial book. As Westerfeld writes in his afterword, the novel is “as much about possible futures as alternate pasts.” Its larger themes are less apparent and more deeply buried than in the Uglies books, and are the more powerful for it. The novel is a study in opposites, of boy versus girl, working class versus aristocracy, British versus German, and its overlying thematic division of Darwinists and Clankers gives all of these a distinctive torque, while avoiding mapping neatly to any specific agenda. The novel’s concluding set piece features a grand, elegant and very satisfying hybridization that suggests that opposites can meet, collapse and mingle, and that this story has natural sequels, which I will undoubtedly read.
Austin Grossman is the author of “Soon I Will Be Invincible,” a novel.
SOMETIMES WE’RE ALWAYS REAL SAME-SAME By Mattox Roesch. Unbridled, paper, $15.95.
When Roesch’s thoughtful first novel opens, Cesar Stone, a 17-year-old Los Angeles gang member whose brother is serving life for murder, is living alone with his financially struggling mother. Determined to make a better life, she moves the two of them back to her hometown — Unalakleet, Alaska, a small fishing village where much of her quirky and eccentric family still lives. (Imagine the protagonist discovering he has a relative named “Aunty Striptease.”) But the most colorful family member is Go-boy, a cousin a few years older and several inches taller than Cesar, whose “black hair stood on end, messy, like a cloud of smoke.” Largehearted and enchanted by life’s mysteries, Go endeavors to make Cesar feel at home, showing him around and getting him a job. Nevertheless, Cesar, homesick, plans his escape — until he meets Go-boy’s beautiful stepsister. But when Go’s enchanted ways darken into something more dangerous, it is Cesar who must help his cousin. Particularly in the middle stretch it feels as though Roesch, who started his career as a story writer, is still learning how to work the stick shift on a long-distance trip, lingering too long in second gear. But he deftly portrays Unalakleet, where “every yard is littered with skeletons of four-wheelers and snow machines and fishing boats,” and once he gets the hang of it, he delivers the narrative soundly to its climactic destination.
THE DEATH OF BUNNY MUNRO By NickCave. Faber & Faber, $25.
Cave’s raunchy second novel gives much away in its title. Bunny Munro, an unapologetic philanderer, lives in England with his wife and son, selling skin lotion door-to-door — a profession that grants him access to the homes and dry hands of many interested women. His commitment to having sex exceeds his commitment to his wife, Libby; and when the novel opens, his extramarital appetites have driven her to suicide, an act that leaves Bunny alone to raise their 9-year-old, Bunny Jr. Denying his role in Libby’s suicide and feeling haunted by her ghost, Bunny flees with Junior, putatively to go on the road and make some sales, a father and son road trip cum vocational tutelage; but it quickly becomes obvious that having sex with as many customers as possible (while his son waits in the car, with a nasty eye infection) is the only thing Bunny believes will drive away both Libby’s specter and that pesky guilt. What ensues is a downward spiral that won’t surprise anyone who knows Cave primarily as the songwriter and frontman for the longtime band the Bad Seeds. Cave’s project here seems to be to expose the depravity of men; but Bunny’s debased behavior never does more than merely confirm that claim, over and over again. As for the credibility-straining Bunny Junior, in the end, he still loves his dad, and Bunny — surprise — is still depraved. While it’s true that Bunny finally sees the error of his ways, that doesn’t happen until after his death. And by then, what does it really matter, for Bunny or for anyone else?
HOME BOY By H. M. Naqvi. Shaye Areheart, $23.
Naqvi’s smart and sorrowful debut is at once immigrant narrative, bildungsroman and New York City novel, with a dash of the picaresque. Immigrant stories are often appealing not only because they dramatize the longing to trade oppression for freedom and prosperity, but also because they have the perfect antagonist: America itself. Set in Manhattan just after Sept. 11, 2001, this novel follows three bright and likable college-age Pakistani men — AC, Jimbo and Chuck. Before 9/11, they fancy themselves “boulevardiers, raconteurs, renaissance men,” delighting in the self-invention that New York permits. After 9/11, everything changes. They abandon their “Metrostani” lifestyle to watch CNN all day, feeling “anxious and low and getting cabin fever.” Finally, they decide action is called for: “There was something heroic in persisting, carrying on.” They plan a road trip to find a mysterious Gatsbyesque friend (the novel is filled with allusions to Fitzgerald), and discover the same thing Gatsby did — there are limits to self-invention in America. Naqvi is a former slam poet, and his exuberant sentences burst with the rhythms and driving power of that form while steering clear of bombast. “Home Boy” is a remarkably engaging novel that delights as it disturbs.
THE CRY OF THE SLOTH The Mostly Tragic Story of Andrew Whittaker, Being His Collected, Final, and Absolutely Complete Writings. By Sam Savage. Coffee House Press, paper, $14.95.
Savage’s offbeat second novel (his 2006 debut, “Firmin,” was told from the point of view of a rat) is an epistolary collage: letters, grocery lists, classified ads, press releases, submission guidelines for a literary magazine, rough drafts of novel passages, journal entries, posted warnings from slumlords — all written by the protagonist, Andrew Whittaker, a lethargic failure in nearly everything he turns his hand to. Set over the course of four months in Rapid Falls, U.S.A., during the Nixon administration, the novel charts Whittaker’s downfall in letters that discuss the breakup of his marriage, his literary journal, the illness of his mother, his childhood neglect, threats by the bank to foreclose on his properties, threats by his tenants to withhold rent until he makes much-needed repairs, and threats by a former lover demanding that Whittaker cease sending letters. In addition, we are treated to smart sendups of a small-town art scene, à la “Waiting for Guffman.” Savage’s satire is in many places spot on and funny in a way that will make other writers squirm. Despite the lack of local support, Whittaker’s one goal is to organize a huge weeklong avant-garde literary festival, to include floats and elephants. The press release states: “We want to increase the dialogue between contemporary cutting-edge writers and the general public, to try and bring an end to the hostility and suspicion prevalent on both sides.” Unfortunately, as rich as the humor is, such satire finally does not sustain the novel. By locking us in the head of an unreliable narrator whose only real action, ultimately, is writing these letters, Savage traps the reader in a narrative Möbius strip. Just when we think we’re turning toward some greater sense of the character and the story, we find ourselves in an increasingly paranoid bit of prose that leads us back, yet again, to where we’ve already been.
Joseph Salvatore teaches writing and literature at the NewSchool.
Ornery Glory of a Hollywood Iconoclast
Review by Janet Maslin
ROBERT ALTMAN
The Oral Biography
By Mitchell Zuckoff
Illustrated. 560 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
Robert Altman once engaged in a jokey contest to create fake country-music song titles. He made up one that perfectly encapsulated his career: “I’m Swimming Through the Ashes of All the Bridges I’ve Burned.”
Those words reflect his withering humor, combative outlook and, above all, tireless forward motion. They convey how Altman, who started out making industrial training films like “How to Run a Filling Station,” persevered through nearly six rambunctious decades of immortal filmmaking that ended with the June 2006 release of his tenderly elegiac “Prairie Home Companion.” When the great man died in November of that year, an Altman grandson expressed the unthinkable: “It’s a wrap.”
Very late in his life the irascible yet cannily reputation-burnishing Altman began cooperating on a biography with Mitchell Zuckoff, now a journalism professor at BostonUniversity. Mr. Zuckoff continued after Altman’s death. He wound up interviewing 200 Altman collaborators, as well as exhuming the voices of journalistic critics and camp followers. He has spun all this material into a big, comprehensive, flesh-and-blood account of Altman’s persona and exploits, though not a serious look at his body of work.
Above all, this book is fair. And surely Mr. Zuckoff has done a lot of careful shaping and wrangling to make it that way, since the assessments in these pages range widely. Some speakers deify Altman; some recall his mean streak; some attest to his endless ability to confound conventional Hollywood thinking. “I don’t like what you do,” Altman says he was told by the studio chief Jack Warner in the days before the 1970 movie “MASH” propelled Altman into the stratosphere and made it fashionable for voices to overlap and actors to ricochet through films at cross-purposes. Warner added, “I call it fog on the lake.”
“Robert Altman: The Oral Biography” is a book that dispels fog. It begins with a slow but insightful tour through Altman’s formative years. He was born in 1925, so was much older than the boy wonders with whom he shared the limelight in 1970s Hollywood. (“At 46, Robert Altman is Hollywood’s youngest 26-year-old genius,” Aljean Harmetz wrote of him in The New York Times in 1971.) He grew up in Kansas City, Mo., and came from an elite background, even though the studied, false egalitarianism of his huge, bustling films (there was only one boss) might later have obscured that.
He was a bomber pilot in World War II. He tattooed Harry S. Truman’s dog. And, until he sabotaged his television career by declaring Kraft’s dramatic programs as cheesy as its cheese, he directed some of the best-loved television shows of the late 1950s and early ’60s. If you grew up watching “Bonanza,” “Maverick,” “Route 66,” “The Millionaire” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” you might have been an Altman fan before you even knew it.
By the time his heyday began, Altman had well-established personal and professional habits. He butted heads with other alpha males. He trampled on screenplays. He charmed women, to the point that his long third marriage to Kathryn Reed Altman (who is heard throughout the book) sounds like something of a miracle. He surrounded himself with a coterie of admirers, and if he could spirit the whole slew of them off to an isolated set and commandeer their full attention, so much the better.
The actor Michael Murphy, whose keen observation of Altman began in the television years, makes a particularly good source for Mr. Zuckoff. “Bob would make the best bloody mary I’ve ever tasted,” Mr. Murphy says of his hard-drinking friend. “Then he would stand up and make a speech, pretty much the same speech every night.” The essence of the speech: “No one in this room knows what this movie is about except me.”
As the oral testimony in “Altman” makes painfully clear, there was a high price for this constant camaraderie. Mr. Altman said very publicly that if given a choice between his family and his work, he would abandon his family forever; his six children heard that loud and clear. Late in his life, sobered by a heart transplant as well as by forced sobriety, he realized that none of his children had gone to college, become self-supporting, avoided substance abuse problems or stayed married. He not only infantilized them but also tricked them out of wages when they worked on his movies.
All this may offer some sense of the gargantuan challenges that faced Mr. Zuckoff as he organized this sprawling, many-faceted story. Yet how he arranges his material can be interesting in its own right. For instance the way he has assembled his account of the making of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller.” Mr. Zuckoff gives the alpha treatment to Warren Beatty, the man who gave Altman the most headaches. Mr. Beatty is allowed to speak last and thus rebut what the other speakers have had to say about him.
Throughout this book there is a distinction between speakers who describe Altman in the present tense and those who, like Mr. Beatty, seem to have been interviewed after the director’s death. There’s also an awkward split between those who speak naturally and those who sound as if they have responded to queries via letter or e-mail.
“Whether you like it or not, Bob was always Bob, and Bob was the Bob he wanted to be,” says a live-sounding Allan Nicholls, who acted in many Altman films — and he goes on from there. By contrast there is this from Kenneth Branagh vis-à-vis “The Gingerbread Man,” a late-life Altman fiasco: “His sensibility was a poetic one that tried to embrace within a passion for cinema the American tradition of moviemaking and to infuse that with the poetic, sometimes anarchic deconstruction of the traditional architecture of genre films.” The most welcome speakers in this star-studded book are those who can be as sharp as the director Paul Thomas Anderson, who delivered the perfect epitaph: “He was so indestructible for so long.”
Alan Rudolph, another of the many directors whose work reflects Altman’s sensibility, assured Mr. Zuckoff that his book would never capture the Altman magic. “It will be elusive and you’ll never get to the center of it,” Mr. Rudolph pointed out, “because you shouldn’t be able to.” But “Altman” fully grasps that paradox. If this book presumed to know all about Altman, it wouldn’t know him at all.
It takes more than 150 pages for Mitchell Zuckoff’s oral biography of Robert Altman to get to “M*A*S*H,” the 1970 movie that transformed its director from a workaday toiler into a one-man film movement, gave us the adjective “Altmanesque” and jump-started a career that would encompass 36 more years and 31 more movies — follies, comebacks, muddles and masterworks. In almost any other account of a Hollywood life, such delayed gratification would seem unconscionable. One can imagine a studio executive in Altman’s splendidly acrid 1992 Hollywood satire, “The Player,” peremptorily explaining to the biographer that his story lacks a big action beat in the first 20 minutes, not to mention a “relatable” hero.
But the long windup to Altman’s arrival proves essential to understanding the filmmaker he became, and one of the many accomplishments of this scrupulously intelligent and entertaining biography is that by the time “M*A*S*H” opens, we’ve come to learn a great deal about how the director’s life shaped the art that followed. Many careers behind the camera are ignited by prodigious early successes. Altman’s was something rarer — a great second act after a first act nobody noticed. The résumé that led him to “M*A*S*H” included duty as an Army pilot during World War II; the better part of a decade spent grinding out industrial films in his native Kansas City, Mo.; and close to another 10 years shooting episodic television shows like “Combat!” and “Bonanza.” After his breakthrough — the movie Pauline Kael hyperbolized as “the best American war comedy since sound came in” — Aljean Harmetz captured the contradiction neatly in The New York Times: “At 46, Robert Altman is Hollywood’s newest 26-year-old genius.” But it’s hard waiting those extra 20 years for someone to call you a wunderkind. By then, the enfant terrible was no enfant (he had six of his own), but having accumulated half a lifetime’s worth of resentment about being locked out of the movie business, he was fully capable of living up to the second half of the label when things didn’t go his way.
Zuckoff, whose previous book was “Ponzi’s Scheme,” has constructed his text almost entirely from interviews with nearly 200 of Altman’s friends and enemies, colleagues and family members, as well as with the man himself. (Altman died at 81 in 2006, before the author’s work was finished, and his voice is often absent from the book’s last third.) As a form of Hollywood storytelling, oral history has its drawbacks — too often, testimony substitutes for authorial perspective, and those unwilling or unable to speak for themselves can be short-shrifted in favor of defensive or self-aggrandizing anecdotes from grudge holders or oversharers. But Zuckoff’s approach works, not just because the form he has chosen mimics so elegantly the boisterous cacophony of a really good Altman movie, but because he lets the contradictions, reconsiderations and regrets play across his pages with no agenda other than to clarify and illuminate the up-and-down-and-up career of a brilliant, erratic film artist.
The result is, appropriately, more likely to restart arguments about Altman than to resolve them, and to send both the director’s admirers and his detractors racing to their DVD shelves to make their cases. For fans — I’m one, and clearly Zuckoff is as well — the best of Altman’s work, from the milestone “Nashville” in 1975 to the Raymond Carver adaptation “Short Cuts” in 1993, is defined by an unsentimental, politically aware epic vision of America, a rigorous lack of bathos (though not of empathy) and an intuitive understanding of how actors work that led many performers to career highs under his loose-handed guidance. Zuckoff’s authoritative accounts of the making of these films and of the 1971 western “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (abetted greatly by the cooperation of, among others, Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Lily Tomlin, Keith Carradine, Julianne Moore, the screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury and Tess Gallagher, Carver’s widow) make a case not only for their artistry, but for the indispensability of the semi-improvisatory, sometimes shambolic approach Altman favored.
Others still argue, however, that his work suffers from knee-jerk cynicism and misanthropy — although it’s hard to imagine a misanthrope who loved the company of other people more than Altman did. More convincingly, they posit that his disdain for the value of screenwriting led to too many films that, according to Michael Tolkin, who wrote the script for “The Player” as well as the novel on which it was based, “are worth watching and watching again, but don’t fully work on the terms on which they could have worked.” In the succinct condemnation of Jules Feiffer, his onetime (and one-time-only) collaborator, on “Popeye,” “He’s not interested in storytelling.”
The charge doesn’t draw much more than a shrug from Altman. “Many writers have hard feelings about what I do to their scripts,” he says, “but my idea is, it’s not their script. Their script is my tool to work with. . . . I don’t owe them an apology.”
Indeed, Altman’s near addiction to defiance, not to mention alcohol and pot, did not seem to yield many “I’m sorry”s — they didn’t suit a man who, Geraldine Chaplin says, “was always at his best when he had his back against the wall with a knife at his throat.” How do you get through an ordinary working day when you always need an enemy on whom to focus your energy? “Every morning I wake up and I’m at the bottom of a very deep hole,” Altman once told the actor Peter Gallagher. “And I scratch and claw all day long, and by the end of the day if I’m lucky I get my eyes above the edge.” Perhaps that explains why, in the words of the director Alan Rudolph, “you were always a guest in his world. He never entered yours.”
The contrition Altman felt in later life was reserved for his third wife, Kathryn, a wise and steadfast companion for 47 years, and his children; the Altman clan’s loving but cleareyed recollections add immeasurable value and verisimilitude to this portrait. But that rue was a long time coming. Soon after “M*A*S*H,” Altman’s son Stephen recalls, his father sat the kids down in the family’s new Malibu mansion and warned them “that if it ever came down to it and he had to choose between all of us and his work, he’d dump us in a second.” The choice was never necessary, but it’s a measure of how fiercely Altman valued the career for which he’d waited so long that decades later, after he stopped drinking and started to develop a warmer relationship with his children, he still said that in retrospect, “I don’t think I’d do anything different. It would be false.”
“Robert Altman” ends on a grace note — almost. Zuckoff lets us witness the ailing director on the final shooting day of his valedictory film, the touching, haunted “Prairie Home Companion.” It’s a movie that one member of his ensemble, Meryl Streep,notes has “a rage underneath it,” and that Altman, in one of his last interviews with Zuckoff, admits is about death: “Everyone is avoiding saying that. But that’s what it’s about.” It would be a lovely close to his story — except that immediately afterward, Altman went to London to direct a disastrous stage production of Arthur Miller’s “Resurrection Blues,” about which various people involved spend part of the penultimate chapter hurling accusations and spitting acid at one another. That’s hardly an ideal fade-out to such a fine and valuable biography. But it is noisy, funny, slightly ill considered, a bit chaotic and wholly believable. In short, Altmanesque.
Mark Harris is a journalist and the author of “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.”
Father and Son in a Vortex of Chaos Book Review by Michiko Kakutani
LAST NIGHT IN TWISTED RIVER
By John Irving.
554 pages. Random House. $28.
“Last Night in TwistedRiver” showcases all of John Irving’s biggest liabilities as a writer: a tricked-up, gimmicky plot; cartoony characters; absurd contrivances; cheesy sentimentality; and a thoroughly preposterous ending. And yet, at the same time, it evolves into a deeply felt and often moving story — a story that with some diligent editing might have ranked right up there with “The World According to Garp” (1978) and “A Widow for One Year” (1998) as one of Mr. Irving’s more powerful works.
The novel, like so many of the author’s tales, is concerned with fathers and sons, with the fear of not being able to protect loved ones, with loss and pain and grief, and with a writer’s efforts to come to terms with these real-life perils by running them through the clattering word processor of his imagination. It deals with the emotional and psychological changes that come with the passage of time. And it is studded, annoyingly, with the same odd little leitmotifs that run through many of the author’s novels like obsessive-compulsive tics, including a flatulent dog; a severed left hand; a series of older, amorous women; and of course, a motley assortment of bears.
Spanning some five decades, this novel moves around the eastern half of America and parts of Canada with a plot that is needlessly garlanded with all sorts of gothic tinsel, pointless digressions, portentous asides and cute Vonnegut-like homilies. What seizes the reader’s attention and moves the story forward are two things: the keenly observed and affecting relationship between an appealing, melancholy cook named Dominic Baciagalupo and his 12-year-old son, Danny, and their seriocomic efforts to escape the wrath of an implacable cop known as Constable Carl, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Victor Hugo’s obsessive Inspector Javert in “Les Misérables.”
Over the years Dom’s fears for Danny give way to Danny’s fears for his father — fears that Mr. Irving persuades the reader to share, building suspense that drives the narrative over the many lumps and bumps in the story line.
Mr. Irving has always had a taste for grotesque deaths and grisly accidents described in grand Guignolesque detail, and “TwistedRiver” is no exception. Danny has killed his beloved baby sitter and his dad’s secret mistress, Jane, by hitting her over the head with an iron skillet, while she is having sex with his father. We’re told that Danny mistook her for a bear — a bear! — that was assaulting his father.
Jane, by coincidence — and there are lots and lots of coincidences in this novel — also happens to be the girlfriend of Constable Carl, the local law officer in their small New Hampshire town, and rather than try to explain how the naked woman came to be killed in Dom’s bed, the Baciagalupos leave the small New Hamphire logging town they have called home, and go on the lam. They will keep on running for several decades, even as Danny grows up to become a famous novelist, whose writing, not unlike his creator’s, is known for its fairy-tale exaggerations and melodramatic worst-case scenarios.
Over the years the Baciagalupos encounter the usual Irving-esque assortment of oddball characters. There is a huge, Amazonian skydiver known as Lady Sky, who parachutes naked into a pigpen; a loco writing student with two vicious dogs that attack Danny; Katie, Danny’s wife (and the mother of his son, Joe), who bears the children of a succession of men in order to get them deferments from serving in Vietnam; Dominic’s best friend, Ketchum, a foul-mouthed logger with a heart of gold; and Ketchum’s sometime girlfriend, Six-Pack Pam, a Bunyonesque dame with a huge appetite for beer.
To build narrative tension while folding stories within stories, Mr. Irving hops and skips through time, frequently backing and filling in order to stingily deal out crucial details to the reader. As the Baciagalupos move from New Hampshire to Boston to Iowa, Vermont and Toronto, the reader gradually pieces together the sequential chapters in Dominic’s and Danny’s lives, and the ways in which one decision here or there has a domino effect on all those they love.
Some of their choices are inexplicable — for instance, Dom’s decision to leave behind Carmella, a woman he has loved for years, when he and Danny realize that Carl is closing in on them in Boston, and that they must quickly move somewhere else. Worse, many of the developments in “TwistedRiver” strain all credulity, like a pair of women who know Constable Carl turning up in the one restaurant on the East Coast where Dom happens to be working as a cook and where Danny happens to be dining that very evening.
Mr. Irving uses coincidences, cliffhanger chapter endings and other 19th-century novelistic devices to hook the reader, while at the same time orchestrating them to underscore the improbable, random nature of real life. Some of his inventions — like a murderous blue car that appears to have zeroed in on Danny’s son — are ludicrous at first glance, but the reader gradually comes to understand that they are writerly metaphors for the precarious nature of life in “a world of accidents,” that the volume we hold in our hands is, in fact, the creation of Danny, who is trying to make sense of the unlikely trajectory of his life through the act of writing.
In this respect “Last Night in TwistedRiver” emerges not just as a tall tale, but also as an entertaining, if messy and long-winded, commentary on the fiction-making process itself.
The young canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long. For a frozen moment, his feet had stopped moving on the floating logs in the basin above the river bend; he'd slipped entirely underwater before anyone could grab his outstretched hand. One of the loggers had reached for the youth's long hair — the older man's fingers groped around in the frigid water, which was thick, almost soupy, with sloughed-off slabs of bark. Then two logs collided hard on the would-be rescuer's arm, breaking his wrist. The carpet of moving logs had completely closed over the young Canadian, who never surfaced; not even a hand or one of his boots broke out of the brown water.
Out on a logjam, once the key log was pried loose, the river drivers had to move quickly and continually; if they paused for even a second or two, they would be pitched into the torrent. In a river drive, death among moving logs could occur from a crushing injury, before you had a chance to drown — but drowning was more common.
From the riverbank, where the cook and his twelve-year-old son could hear the cursing of the logger whose wrist had been broken, it was immediately apparent that someone was in more serious trouble than the would-be rescuer, who'd freed his injured arm and had managed to regain his footing on the flowing logs. His fellow river drivers ignored him; they moved with small, rapid steps toward shore, calling out the lost boy's name. The loggers ceaselessly prodded with their pike poles, directing the floating logs ahead of them. The rivermen were, for the most part, picking the safest way ashore, but to the cook's hopeful son it seemed that they might have been trying to create a gap of sufficient width for the young Canadian to emerge. In truth, there were now only intermittent gaps between the logs. The boy who'd told them his name was "Angel Pope, from Toronto," was that quickly gone.
"Is it Angel?" the twelve-year-old asked his father. This boy, with his dark-brown eyes and intensely serious expression, could have been mistaken for Angel's younger brother, but there was no mistaking the family resemblance that the twelve-year-old bore to his ever-watchful father. The cook had an aura of controlled apprehension about him, as if he routinely anticipated the most unforeseen disasters, and there was something about his son's seriousness that reflected this; in fact, the boy looked so much like his father that several of the woodsmen had expressed their surprise that the son didn't also walk with his dad's pronounced limp.
The cook knew too well that indeed it was the young Canadian who had fallen under the logs. It was the cook who'd warned the loggers that Angel was too green for the river drivers' work; the youth should not have been trying to free a logjam. But probably the boy had been eager to please, and maybe the rivermen hadn't noticed him at first.
In the cook's opinion, Angel Pope had also been too green (and too clumsy) to be working in the vicinity of the main blade in a sawmill. That was strictly the sawyer's territory — a highly skilled position in the mills. The planer operator was a relatively skilled position, too, though not particularly dangerous.
The more dangerous and less skilled positions included working on the log deck, where logs were rolled into the mill and onto the saw carriage, or unloading logs from the trucks. Before the advent of mechanical loaders, the logs were unloaded by releasing trip bunks on the sides of the trucks — this allowed an entire load to roll off a truck at once. But the trip bunks sometimes failed to release; the men were occasionally caught under a cascade of logs while they were trying to free a bunk.
As far as the cook was concerned, Angel shouldn't have been in any position that put the boy in close proximity to moving logs. But the lumberjacks had been as fond of the young Canadian as the cook and his son had been, and Angel had said he was bored working in the kitchen. The youth had wanted more physical labor, and he liked the outdoors.
The repeated thunk-thunk of the pike poles, poking the logs, was briefly interrupted by the shouts of the rivermen who had spotted Angel's pike pole — more than fifty yards from where the boy had vanished. The fifteen-foot pole was floating free of the log drive, out where the river currents had carried it away from the logs.
The cook could see that the river driver with the broken wrist had come ashore, carrying his pike pole in his good hand. First by the familiarity of his cursing, and only secondarily by the logger's matted hair and tangled beard, did the cook realize that the injured man was Ketchum — no neophyte to the treachery of a log drive.
It was April — not long after the last snowmelt and the start of mud season — but the ice had only recently broken up in the river basin, the first logs falling through the ice upstream of the basin, on the Dummer ponds. The river was ice-cold and swollen, and many of the lumberjacks had heavy beards and long hair, which would afford them some scant protection from the blackflies in mid-May.
Ketchum lay on his back on the riverbank like a beached bear. The moving mass of logs flowed past him. It appeared as if the log drive were a life raft, and the loggers who were still out on the river seemed like castaways at sea — except that the sea, from one moment to the next, turned from greenish brown to bluish black. The water in TwistedRiver was richly dyed with tannins.
"[Expletive], Angel!" Ketchum shouted from his back. "I said, 'Move your feet, Angel. You have to keep moving your feet!' Oh, [expletive]."
The vast expanse of logs had been no life raft for Angel, who'd surely drowned or been crushed to death in the basin above the river bend, although the lumberjacks (Ketchum among them) would follow the log drive at least to where Twisted River poured into the Pontook Reservoir at Dead Woman Dam. The Pontook Dam on the AndroscogginRiver had created the reservoir; once the logs were let loose in the Androscoggin, they would next encounter the sorting gaps outside Milan. In Berlin, the Androscoggin dropped two hundred feet in three miles; two paper mills appeared to divide the river at the sorting gaps in Berlin. It was not inconceivable to imagine that young Angel Pope, from Toronto, was on his way there. come nightfall, the cook and his son were still attempting to salvage leftovers, for tomorrow's meals, from the scores of untouched dinners in the small settlement's dining lodge — the cookhouse in the so-called town of Twisted River, which was barely larger and only a little less transient than a logging camp. Not long ago, the only dining lodge on a river drive hadn't been a lodge at all. There once was a traveling kitchen that had been permanently built onto a truck body, and an adjacent truck on which a modular dining hall could be taken down and reassembled — this was when the trucks used to perpetually move camp to another site on TwistedRiver, wherever the loggers were working next.
In those days, except on the weekends, the rivermen rarely went back to the town of Twisted River to eat or sleep. The camp cook had often cooked in a tent. Everything had to be completely portable; even the sleeping shelters were built onto truck bodies.
Now nobody knew what would become of the less-than-thriving town of Twisted River, which was situated partway between the river basin and the Dummer ponds. The sawmill workers and their families lived there, and the logging company maintained bunkhouses for the more transient woodsmen, who included not only the French Canadian itinerants but most of the river drivers and the other loggers. The company also maintained a better equipped kitchen, an actual dining lodge — the aforementioned cookhouse — for the cook and his son. But for how much longer? Not even the owner of the logging company knew.
The lumber industry was in transition; it would one day be possible for every worker in the logging business to work from home. The logging camps (and even the slightly less marginal settlements like TwistedRiver) were dying. The wanigans themselves were disappearing; those curious shelters for sleeping and eating and storing equipment had not only been mounted on trucks, on wheels, or on crawler tracks, but they were often attached to rafts or boats.
The Indian dishwasher — she worked for the cook — had long ago told the cook's young son that wanigan was from an Abenaki word, leading the boy to wonder if the dishwasher herself was from the Abenaki tribe. Perhaps she just happened to know the origin of the word, or she'd merely claimed to know it. (The cook's son went to school with an Indian boy who'd told him that wanigan was of Algonquian origin.)
While it lasted, the work during a river drive was from dawn till dark. It was the protocol in a logging operation to feed the men four times a day. In the past, when the wanigans couldn't get close to a river site, the two midday meals had been trekked to the drivers. The first and last meal were served in the base camp — nowadays, in the dining lodge. But out of their affection for Angel, tonight many of the loggers had missed their last meal in the cookhouse. They'd spent the evening following the log drive, until the darkness had driven them away — not only the darkness, but also the men's growing awareness that none of them knew if Dead Woman Dam was open. From the basin below the town of Twisted River, the logs — probably with Angel among them — might already have flowed into the Pontook Reservoir, but not if Dead Woman Dam was closed. And if the Pontook Dam and Dead Woman were open, the body of the young Canadian would be headed pell-mell down the Androscoggin. No one knew better than Ketchum that there would likely be no finding Angel there.
The cook could tell when the river drivers had stopped searching — from the kitchen's screen door, he could hear them leaning their pike poles against the cookhouse. A few of the tired searchers found their way to the dining lodge after dark; the cook didn't have the heart to turn them away. The hired help had all gone home — everyone but the Indian dishwasher, who stayed late most nights. The cook, whose difficult name was Dominic Baciagalupo — or "Cookie," as the lumberjacks routinely called him — made the men a late supper, which his twelve-yearold son served.
"Where's Ketchum?" the boy asked his dad.
"He's probably getting his arm fixed," the cook replied.
"I'll bet he's hungry," the twelve-year-old said, "but Ketchum is wicked tough."
"He's impressively tough for a drinking man," Dominic agreed, but he was thinking that maybe Ketchum wasn't tough enough for this. Losing Angel Pope might be hardest on Ketchum, the cook thought, because the veteran logger had taken the young Canadian under his wing. He'd looked after the boy, or he had tried to.
Ketchum had the blackest hair and beard — the charred-black color of charcoal, blacker than a black bear's fur. He'd been married young — and more than once. He was estranged from his children, who had grown up and gone their own ways. Ketchum lived yearround in one of the bunkhouses, or in any of several run-down hostelries, if not in a wanigan of his own devising — namely, in the back of his pickup truck, where he had come close to freezing to death on those winter nights when he'd passed out, dead drunk. Yet Ketchum had kept Angel away from alcohol, and he'd kept not a few of the older women at the so-called dance hall away from the young Canadian, too.
"You're too young, Angel," the cook had heard Ketchum tell the youth. "Besides, you can catch things from those ladies."
Ketchum would know, the cook had thought. Dominic knew that Ketchum had done more damage to himself than breaking his wrist in a river drive.
the steady hiss and intermittent flickering of the pilot lights on the gas stove in the cookhouse kitchen — an old Garland with two ovens and eight burners, and a flame-blackened broiler above — seemed perfectly in keeping with the lamentations of the loggers over their late supper. They had been charmed by the lost boy, whom they'd adopted as they would a stray pet. The cook had been charmed, too.
Perhaps he saw in the unusually cheerful teenager some future incarnation of his twelve-year-old son — for Angel had a welcoming expression and a sincere curiosity, and he exhibited none of the withdrawn sullenness that appeared to afflict the few young men his age in a rough and rudimentary place like TwistedRiver.
This was all the more remarkable because the youth had told them that he'd recently run away from home.
"You're Italian, aren't you?" Dominic Baciagalupo had asked the boy.
"I'm not from Italy, I don't speak Italian — you're not much of an Italian if you come from Toronto," Angel had answered.
The cook had held his tongue. Dominic knew a little about Boston Italians; some of them seemed to have issues regarding how Italian they were. And the cook knew that Angel, in the old country, might have been an Angelo. (When Dominic had been a little boy, his mother had called him Angelù — in her Sicilian accent, this sounded like an-geh-LOO.)
But after the accident, nothing with Angel Pope's written name could be found; among the boy's few belongings, not a single book or letter identified him. If he'd had any identification, it had gone into the river basin with him — probably in the pocket of his dungarees — and if they never located the body, there would be no way to inform Angel's family, or whoever the boy had run away from.
Legally or not, and with or without proper papers, Angel Pope had made his way across the Canadian border to New Hampshire. Not the way it was usually done, either — Angel hadn't come from Quebec. He'd made a point of arriving from Ontario — he was not a French Canadian. The cook hadn't once heard Angel speak a word of French or Italian, and the French Canadians at the camp had wanted nothing to do with the runaway boy — apparently, they didn't like English Canadians. Angel, for his part, kept his distance from the French; he didn't appear to like the Québécois any better than they liked him. Dominic had respected the boy's privacy; now the cook wished he knew more about Angel Pope, and where he'd come from. Angel had been a good-natured and fair-minded companion for the cook's twelve-year-old son, Daniel — or Danny, as the loggers and the saw -mill men called the boy.
Almost every male of working age in TwistedRiver knew the cook and his son — some women, too. Dominic had needed to know a number of women — mainly, to help him look after his son — for the cook had lost his wife, Danny's young mother, a long-seeming decade ago. Dominic Baciagalupo believed that Angel Pope had had some experience with kitchen work, which the boy had done awkwardly but uncomplainingly, and with an economy of movement that must have been born of familiarity — despite his professed boredom with cooking-related chores, and his penchant for cutting himself on the cutting board.
Moreover, the young Canadian was a reader; he'd borrowed many books that had belonged to Dominic's late wife, and he often read aloud to Daniel. It was Ketchum's opinion that Angel had read Robert Louis Stevenson to young Dan "to excess" — not only Kidnapped and Treasure Island but his unfinished deathbed novel, St. Ives, which Ketchum said should have died with the author. At the time of the accident on the river, Angel had been reading The Wrecker to Danny.
(Ketchum had not yet weighed in with his opinion of that novel.) Well, whatever Angel Pope's background had been, he'd had some schooling, clearly — more than most of the French Canadian woodsmen the cook had known. (More than most of the sawmill workers and the local woodsmen, too.)
"Why did Angel have to die?" Danny asked his dad. The twelveyear-old was helping his father wipe down the dining tables after the late-arriving loggers had gone off to bed, or perhaps to drink. And although she often kept herself busy in the cookhouse quite late into the night, at least well past Danny's bedtime, the Indian dishwasher had finished with her chores; by now, she'd driven her truck back to town. "Angel didn't have to die, Daniel — it was an avoidable accident." The cook's vocabulary often made reference to avoidable accidents, and his twelve-year-old son was overfamiliar with his father's grim and fatalistic thoughts on human fallibility — the recklessness of youth, in particular. "He was too green to be out on a river drive," the cook said, as if that were all there was to it.
Danny Baciagalupo knew his dad's opinion of all the things Angel, or any boy that age, was too green to do. The cook also would have wanted to keep Angel far away from a peavey. (The peavey's most important feature was the hinged hook that made it possible to roll a heavy log by hand. )
According to Ketchum, the "old days" had been more perilous. Ketchum claimed that working with the horses, pulling the scoots out of the winter woods, was risky work. In the winter, the lumberjacks tramped up into the mountains. They'd cut down the trees and (not that long ago) used horses to pull the timber out, one log at a time. The scoots, or wheelless drays, were dragged like sleds on the frozen snow, which not even the horses' hooves could penetrate because the sled ruts on the horse-haul roads were iced down every night. Then the snowmelt and mud season came, and — "back then," as Ketchum would say — all the work in the woods was halted.
But even this was changing. Since the new logging machinery could work in muddy conditions and haul much longer distances to improved roads, which could be used in all seasons, mud season itself was becoming less of an issue — and horses were giving way to crawler tractors.
The bulldozers made it possible to build a road right to a logging site, where the wood could be hauled out by truck. The trucks moved the wood to a more central drop point on a river, or on a pond or lake; in fact, highway transport would very soon supplant the need for river drives. Gone were the days when a snubbing winch had been used to ease the horses down the steeper slopes. "The teams could slide on their haunches," Ketchum had told young Dan. (Ketchum rated oxen highly, for their steady footing in deep snow, but oxen had never been widely used.)
Gone, too, was railroad logging in the woods; it came to an end in the PemigewassetValley in '48 — the same year one of Ketchum's cousins had been killed by a Shay locomotive at the LivermoreFalls paper mill. The Shay weighed fifty tons and had been used to pull the last of the rails from the woods. The former railroad beds made for firm haul roads for the trucks in the 1950s, although Ketchum could still remember a murder on the Beebe River Railroad — back when he'd been the teamster for a bobsled loaded with prime virgin spruce behind a four-horse rig. Ketchum had been the teamster on one of the early Lombard steam engines, too — the one steered by a horse. The horse had turned the front sled runners, and the teamster sat at the front of the log hauler; later models replaced the horse and teamster with a helmsman at a steering wheel. Ketchum had been a helmsman, too, Danny Baciagalupo knew — clearly, Ketchum had done everything. The old Lombard log-hauler roads around TwistedRiver were truck roads now, although there were derelict Lombards abandoned in the area. (There is one still standing upright in Twisted River, and another one, tipped on its side, in the logging camp in West Dummer — or Paris, as the settlement was usually called, after the Paris Manufacturing Company of Paris, Maine.)
Phillips Brook ran to Paris and the Ammonoosuc — and into the Connecticut River. The rivermen drove hardwood sawlogs along Phillips Brook to Paris, and some pulpwood, too. The sawmill in Paris was strictly a hardwoods operation — the manufacturing company in Maine made toboggans — and the logging camp in Paris, with its steam-powered sawmill, had converted the former horse hovel to a machine shop. The mill manager's house was also there, together with a seventy-five-man bunkhouse and a mess hall, and some rudimentary family housing — not to mention an optimistically planted apple orchard and a schoolhouse. That there was no schoolhouse in the town of Twisted River, nor had anyone been optimistic enough about the settlement's staying power to plant any apple trees, gave rise to the opinion (held chiefly in Paris) that the logging camp was a more civilized community, and less temporary, than Twisted River.
At the height of land between the two outposts, no fortune-teller would have been foolish enough to predict success or longevity for either settlement. Danny Baciagalupo had heard Ketchum declare certain doom for the logging camp in Parisand for TwistedRiver, but Ketchum "suffered no progress gladly" — as the cook had cautioned his son. Dominic Baciagalupo was not a storyteller; the cook routinely cast doubt on some of Ketchum's stories. "Daniel, don't be in too big a hurry to buy into the Ketchum version," Dominic would say.
Had Ketchum's aunt, an accountant, truly been killed by a toppled stack of edging in the lathe mill in Milan? "I'm not sure there is, or ever was, a lathe mill in Milan, Daniel," the cook had warned his son. And according to Ketchum, one thunderstorm had killed four people in the sawmill at the outlet dam to Dummer Pond — the bigger and uppermost of the Dummer ponds. Allegedly, lightning had struck the log carriage. "The dogger and the setter, not to mention the sawyer holding the band-saw levers and the takeaway man, were killed by a single bolt," Ketchum had told Danny. Witnesses had watched the entire mill burn to the ground.
"I'm surprised that another of Ketchum's relatives wasn't among the victims, Daniel," was all that Dominic would say.
Indeed, another of Ketchum's cousins had fallen into the slasher in a pulpwood slasher mill; an uncle had been brained by a flying fourfoot log at a cut-up mill, where they'd been cutting long spruce logs into pulpwood length. And there'd once been a floating steam donkey on Dummer Pond; it was used to bunch logs for the sawmill entrance at the outlet dam, but the engine had exploded. A man's ear was found frozen in the spring snow on the island in the pond, where all the trees had been singed by the explosion. Later, Ketchum said, an ice fisherman used the ear for bait in the Pontook Reservoir.
"More relatives of yours, I assume?" the cook had asked.
"Not that I'm aware of," Ketchum had replied.
Ketchum claimed to have known the "legendary [expletive]" who'd constructed a horse hovel upstream of the bunkhouse and mess hall at Camp Five. When all the men in the logging camp got sick, they strung up the purported legend in a network of bridles in the horse hovel above the manure pit — "until the [expletive] fainted from the fumes."
"You can see why Ketchum misses the old days, Daniel," the cook had said to his son.
Dominic Baciagalupo knew some stories — most of them not for telling. And what stories the cook could tell his son didn't capture young Dan's imagination the way Ketchum's stories did. There was the one about the bean hole outside the cook's tent on the Chick wolnepy, near Success Pond. In the aforementioned old days, on a river drive, Dominic had dug a bean hole, four feet across, and started the beans cooking in the ground at bedtime, covering the hole with hot ashes and earth. At 5 a.m., when it would be piping hot, he planned to dig the covered pot out of the ground for breakfast. But a French Canadian had wandered out of the sleeping wanigan (probably to take a pee) when it was still dark; he was barefoot when he fell into the bean hole, burning both his feet.
"That's it? That's the whole story?" Danny had asked his dad.
"Well, it's kind of a cooking story, I guess," Ketchum had said, to be kind. Ketchum would tease Dominic on the subject that spaghetti was replacing baked beans and pea soup on the upper Androscoggin.
"We never used to have so many Italian cooks around," Ketchum would say, winking at Danny.
"You're telling me you'd rather have baked beans and pea soup than pasta?" the cook asked his old friend.
"Your dad is a touchy little fella, isn't he?" Ketchum would say to Danny, winking again. "Constipated Christ!" Ketchum had more than once declared to Dominic. "Are you ever touchy!"
now it was that mud-season, swollen-river time of year again.
There'd been a strong surge of water coming through one of the sluice gates — what Ketchum called a "driving head," probably from the sluice gate at the east end of Little Dummer Pond — and a green kid from Toronto, whom they barely knew, had been swept away.
For only a while longer would the loggers increase the volume of water in TwistedRiver. They did this by building sluice dams on the tributary streams flowing into the main driving river; the water above these dams was released in the spring, adding torrents of water volume to a log drive. The pulpwood was piled in these streams (and on the riverbanks) during the winter and then sluiced into TwistedRiver on the water released from the dams. If this was soon after the snowmelt, the water ran fast, and the riverbanks were gouged by the moving logs. In the cook's opinion, there were not enough bends in TwistedRiver to account for the river's name. The river ran straight down out of the mountains; there were only two bends in it. But to the loggers, particularly those old-timers who'd named the river, these two bends were bad enough to cause some treacherous logjams every spring — especially upstream of the basin, nearer the Dummer ponds. At both bends in the river, the trapped logs usually needed to be pried loose by hand; at the bend upriver, where the current was strongest, no one as green as Angel would have been permitted out on a logjam.
But Angel had perished in the basin, where the river was comparatively calm. The logs themselves made the water in the river basin choppy, but the currents were fairly moderate. And at both bends, the more massive jams were broken up with dynamite, which Dominic Baciagalupo deplored. The blasting wreaked havoc with the pots and pans and dangling utensils in the cookhouse kitchen; in the dining hall, the sugar bowls and the ketchup bottles slid off the tables. "If your dad is not a storyteller, Danny, he is definitely not a dynamite man," was how Ketchum had put it to the boy.
From the basin below the town of Twisted River, the water ran downstream to the Androscoggin. In addition to the Connecticut, the big log-driving rivers in northern New Hampshire were the Ammonoosuc and the Androscoggin: Those rivers were documented killers.
But some rivermen had drowned, or been crushed to death, in the relatively short stretch of rapids between Little Dummer Pond and the town of Twisted River — and in the river basin, too. Angel Pope wasn't the first; nor would the young Canadian be the last.
And in the compromised settlements of TwistedRiver and Paris, a fair share of sawmill workers had been maimed, or had even lost their lives — no small number of them, unfortunately, because of the fights they got into with the loggers in certain bars. There weren't enough women — that was usually what started the fights — although Ketchum had maintained that there weren't enough bars. There were no bars in Paris, anyway, and only married women lived in the logging camp there.
In Ketchum's opinion, that combination put the men from Paris on the haul road to TwistedRiver almost every night. "They never should have built a bridge over Phillips Brook," Ketchum also maintained. "You see, Daniel," the cook said to his son. "Ketchum has once again demonstrated that progress will eventually kill us all."
"Catholic thinking will kill us first, Danny," Ketchum would say.
"Italians are Catholics, and your dad is Italian — and so are you, of course, although neither you nor your dad is very Italian, or very Catholic in your thinking, either. I am mainly speaking of the French Canadians when I refer to Catholic thinking. French Canadians, for example, have so many children that they sometimes number them instead of name them."
"Dear God," Dominic Baciagalupo said, shaking his head.
"Is that true?" young Dan asked Ketchum.
"What kind of name is Vingt Dumas?" Ketchum asked the boy.
"Roland and Joanne Dumas do not have twenty children!" the cook cried.
"Not together, maybe," Ketchum replied. "So what was little Vingt? A slip of the tongue?"
Dominic was shaking his head again. "What?" Ketchum asked him.
"I promised Daniel's mother that the boy would get a proper education," the cook said.
"Well, I'm just making an effort to enhance Danny's education," Ketchum reasoned.
"Enhance," Dominic repeated, still shaking his head. "Your vocabulary, Ketchum," the cook began, but he stopped himself; he said nothing further.
Neither a storyteller nor a dynamite man, Danny Baciagalupo thought of his father. The boy loved his dad dearly, but there was also a habit the cook had, and his son had noticed it — Dominic often didn't finish his thoughts. (Not out loud, anyway.)
not counting the Indian dishwasher — and a few of the sawmill workers' wives, who helped the cook in the kitchen — there were rarely any women eating in the cookhouse, except on the weekends, when some of the men ate with their families. That alcohol was not permitted was the cook's rule. Dinner (or "supper," as the older rivermen used to eating in the wanigans called it) was served as soon as it was dark, and the majority of loggers and sawmill men were sober when they ate their evening meal, which they consumed quickly and with no intelligible conversation — even on weekends, or when the loggers weren't engaged in the river drives.
As the men had usually come to eat directly from some manner of work, their clothes were soiled and they smelled of pitch and spruce gum and wet bark and sawdust, but their hands and faces were clean and freshly scented by the pine-tar soap that the cavernous washroom of the cookhouse made readily available — at the cook's request. (Washing your hands before eating was another of Dominic's rules.) Furthermore, the washroom towels were always clean; the clean towels were part of the reason that the Indian dishwasher generally stayed late. While the kitchen help was washing the last of the supper dishes, the dishwasher herself was loading the towels into the washing machines in the cookhouse's laundry room. She never went home until the washing cycles had ended and she'd put all the towels in the dryers.
The dishwasher was called Injun Jane, but not to her face. Danny Baciagalupo liked her, and she appeared to dote on the boy. She was more than a decade older than his dad (she was even older than Ketchum), and she had lost a son — possibly he'd drowned in the Pemigewasset, if Danny hadn't misheard the story. Or maybe Jane and her dead son were from the Pemigewasset Wilderness — they may have come from that part of the state, northwest of the mills in Conway — and the doomed son had drowned elsewhere. There was a bigger, uncontained wilderness north of Milan, where the spruce mill was; there were more logging camps up there, and lots of places where a young logger might drown. ( Jane had told Danny that Pemigewasset meant "Alley of the Crooked Pines," which conjured to the impressionable boy a likely place to drown.)
All young Dan could really remember was that it had been a wilderness river-driving accident — and from the fond way the dishwasher looked at the cook's son, perhaps her lost boy had been about twelve when he drowned. Danny didn't know, and he didn't ask; everything he knew about Injun Jane was something he'd silently observed or had imperfectly overheard.
"Listen only to those conversations that are directed to you, Daniel," his father had warned him. The cook meant that Danny shouldn't eavesdrop on the disjointed or incoherent remarks the men made to one another when they were eating.
Most nights, after their evening meal — but never as flagrantly as in the wanigan days, and not usually when there was an early-morning river drive — the loggers and the sawmill men drank. The few who had actual homes in TwistedRiver drank at home. The transients — meaning most of the woodsmen and all the Canadian itinerants — drank in their bunkhouses, which were crudely equipped in that dank area of town immediately above the river basin. These hostelries were within walking distance of the dismal bars and the seedy, misnamed dance hall, where there was no actual dancing — only music and the usual too-few women to meet.
The loggers and sawmill workers with families preferred the smaller but contentiously more "civilized" settlement in Paris. Ketchum refused to call the logging camp "Paris," referring instead to what he said was the real name of the place — West Dummer. "No community, not even a logging camp, should be named for a manufacturing company," Ketchum declared. It further offended Ketchum that a logging operation in New Hampshire was named after a company in Maine — one that manufactured toboggans, of all things.
"Dear God!" the cook cried. "Soon all the wood on TwistedRiver will be pulpwood — for paper! What about toboggans is worse than paper?"
"Books are made from paper!" Ketchum declared. "What role do toboggans play in your son's education?"
There was a scarcity of children in TwistedRiver, and they went to school in Paris — as Danny Baciagalupo did, when he went to school at all. For the betterment of young Dan's education, the cook not infrequently kept his son home from school — so that the boy could read a book or two, a practice not necessarily encouraged by the Paris (or, as Ketchum would have it, the West Dummer) school. "Perish the thought that the children in a logging camp should learn to read!" Ketchum railed. As a child, he had not learned to read; he was forever angry about it.
There were — there still are — good markets for both sawlogs and pulpwood over the Canadian border. The north country of New Hampshire continues to feed wood in huge quantities to paper mills in New Hampshire and Maine, and to a furniture mill in Vermont. But of the logging camps, as they used to be, mere tumbledown evidence remains.
In a town like TwistedRiver, only the weather wouldn't change. From the sluice dam at the bottom of Little Dummer Pond to the basin below TwistedRiver, a persistent fog or mist lay suspended above the violent water until midmorning — in all seasons, except when the river was frozen. From the sawmills, the keen whine of the blades was both as familiar and expected as the songs of birds, though neither the sounds of sawing nor the birdsongs were as reliable as the fact that there was never any spring weather in that part of New Hampshire — except for the regrettable period of time from early April till the middle of May, which was distinguished by frozen, slowly thawing mud.
Yet the cook had stayed, and there were few in TwistedRiver who knew why. There were fewer who knew why he'd come in the first place, and from where or when. But his limp had a history, of which everyone was aware. In a sawmill or logging-camp kind of town, a limp like Dominic Baciagalupo's was not uncommon. When logs of any size were set in motion, an ankle could get crushed. Even when he wasn't walking, it was obvious that the boot on the cook's maimed foot was two sizes bigger than the one he wore on his good foot — and when he was either sitting down or standing still, his bigger boot pointed the wrong way. To those knowledgeable souls in the settlement of TwistedRiver, such an injury could have come from any number of logging accidents.
Dominic had been pretending to be a teenager; in his own estimation, he was not as green as Angel Pope, but he was "green enough," as the cook would tell his son. He'd had an after-school job on the loading platforms at one of the big mills in Berlin, where a friend of Dominic's absent father was a foreman. Until World War II, the supposed friend of Dominic's dad was a fixture there, but the cook remembered so-called Uncle Umberto as an alcoholic who repeatedly bad-mouthed Dominic's mom. (Even after the accident, Dominic Baciagalupo was never contacted by his absconding father, and "Uncle" Umberto not once proved himself as a family friend.) There was a load of hardwood sawlogs on the log deck — mostly maple and birch. Young Dominic was using a peavey, rolling the logs into the mill, when a bunch of logs rolled all at once and he couldn't get out of their way. He was only twelve in 1936; he handled a peavey with a rakish confidence. Dominic had been the same age as his son was now; the cook would never have allowed his beloved Daniel on a log deck, not even if the boy had been ambidextrous with a peavey. And in Dominic's case, when he had been knocked down by the logs, the hinged hook of his own peavey was driven into his left thigh, like a fishhook without the barb, and his left ankle was crunched sideways — it was shattered and mangled under the weight of the wood. From the peavey wound, he was in no danger of bleeding to death, but one could always die of blood poisoning in those days. From the ankle injury, he might have died of gangrene later — or, more likely, had the left foot amputated, if not the entire leg.
There were no X-rays in CoosCounty in 1936. The medical authorities in Berlin were disinclined to undertake any fancy reassembly of a crushed ankle; in such cases, little or no surgery was recommended. It was a wait-and-see category of accident: Either the blood vessels were mashed flat and there would be a subsequent loss of circulation — then the doctors would have to cut the foot off — or the broken and displaced bits of the ankle would fuse together and heal every which way, and Dominic Baciagalupo would walk with a limp and be in pain for the rest of his life. (That would turn out to be the case.)
There was also the scar where the peavey had hooked him, which resembled the bite wound of a small, peculiar animal — one with a curved, solitary tooth and a mouth that wasn't big enough to enclose the twelve-year-old's thigh. And even before he took a step, the angle of Dominic's left foot indicated a sharp left turn; the toes were aimed in a sideways direction. People often noticed the deformed shape of the ankle and the misdirected foot before they saw the limp.
One thing was certain: Young Dominic wouldn't be a logger. You need your balance for that kind of work. And the mills were where he'd been injured — not to mention that his runaway father's drunken "friend" was a foreman there. The mills were not in Dominic Baciagalupo's future, either.
"Hey, Baciagalupo!" Uncle Umberto had often hailed him. "You may have a Neapolitan name, but you hang around like a Sicilian."
"I am Sicilian," Dominic would dutifully say; his mother seemed inordinately proud of it, the boy thought.
"Yeah, well, your name is napolitano," Umberto told him.
"After my dad, I suppose," young Dominic ventured to guess.
"Your dad was no Baciagalupo," Uncle Umberto informed him.
"Ask Nunzi where your name came from — she gave it to you."
The twelve-year-old didn't like it when Umberto, who clearly disliked Dominic's mother, called her "Nunzi" — an affectionate family nickname, shortened from Annunziata — which Umberto didn't say affectionately at all. (In a play, or in a film, the audience would have had no trouble recognizing Umberto as a minor character; yet the best actor to play Umberto would be one who always believed he was cast in a major role.)
"And you're not really my uncle, I suppose?" Dominic inquired of Umberto.
"Ask your mama," Umberto said. "If she wanted to keep you siciliano, she shoulda given you her name."
His mother's maiden name was Saetta — she was very proud of the sigh-AY-tah, as she pronounced the Sicilian name, and of all the Saettas Dominic had heard her speak of when she chose to talk about her heritage.
Annunziata was reluctant to speak of Dominic's heritage at all. What little the boy had gleaned — bits of information, or misinformation — had been gathered slowly and insufficiently, like the partial evidence, the incomplete clues, in the increasingly popular board game of young Dan's childhood, one the cook and Ketchum played with the boy, and sometimes Jane joined them. (Was it Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the candlestick, or had the murder been committed by Miss Scarlet in the ballroom with the revolver?) All young Dominic knew was that his father, a Neapolitan, had abandoned the pregnant Annunziata Saetta in Boston; he was rumored to have taken a boat back to Naples. To the question "Where is he now?" (which the boy had asked his mother, many times), Annunziata would shrug and sigh, and looking either to Heaven or in the direction of the exhaust vent above her kitchen stove, she would say mysteriously to her son: "Vicino di Napoli." "In the vicinity of Naples," young Dominic had guessed. With the help of an atlas, and because the boy had heard his mother murmur the names of two hill towns (and provinces) in the vicinity of Naples in her sleep — Benevento and Avellino — Dominic had concluded that his dad had fled to that region of Italy.
As for Umberto, he was clearly not an uncle — and definitely a "legendary [expletive]," as Ketchum would have said.
"What kind of name is Umberto?" Dominic had asked the foreman.
"From da king!" Umberto had answered indignantly.
"I mean it's a Neapolitan name, right?" the boy had asked.
"What are you questioning me for? You da twelve-year-old, pretending to be sixteen!" Umberto cried.
"You told me to say I was sixteen," Dominic reminded the foreman.
"Look, you gotta job, Baciagalupo," Umberto had said.
Then the logs rolled, and Dominic became a cook. His mother, a Sicilian-born Italian-American transported by an unwanted pregnancy from Boston's North End to Berlin, New Hampshire, could cook. She'd left the city and had moved to the north country when Gennaro Capodilupo had slipped away to the docks off Atlantic Avenue and Commercial Street, leaving her with child as he sailed (figuratively, if not literally) "back to Naples."
[Expletive] (if not Uncle) Umberto was right: Dominic's dad was no Baciagalupo. The absconding father was a Capodilupo — cah-poh-dee-LEW-poh, as Annunziata told her son, meant "Head of the Wolf." What was the unwed mother to do? "For the lies he told, your father should have been a Boccadalupo!" she said to Dominic. This meant "Mouth of the Wolf," the boy would learn — a fitting name for [Expletive] Umberto, young Dominic often thought. "But you, Angelù — you are my kiss of the wolf!" his mom said.
In an effort to legitimize him, and because his mother had a highhanded love of words, she would not name Dominic a head of (or a mouth of ) the wolf; for Annunziata Saetta, only a kiss of the wolf would do. It should have been spelled "Baciacalupo," but Nunzi always pronounced the second "c" in Baciacalupo like a "g." Over time, and due to a clerical error in kindergarten, the misspelled name had stuck. He'd become Dominic Baciagalupo before he became a cook. His mother also called him Dom, for short — Dominic being derived from doménica, which means "Sunday." Not that Annunziata was a tireless adherent of what Ketchum called "Catholic thinking." What was both Catholic and Italian in the Saetta family had driven the young, unmarried woman north to New Hampshire; in Berlin, other Italians (presumably, also Catholics) would look after her.
Had they expected she would put her child up for adoption, and come back to the North End? Nunzi knew that this was done, but she wouldn't consider giving up her baby, and — notwithstanding the sizable nostalgia she expressed for the Italian North End — she was never tempted to go back to Boston, either. In her unplanned condition, she had been sent away; understandably, she resented it.
While Annunziata remained a loyal Sicilian in her own kitchen, the proverbial ties that bind were irreparably frayed. Her Boston family — and, by association, the Italian community in the North End, and whatever represented "Catholic thinking" there — had disowned her. In turn, she disowned them. Nunzi never went to Mass herself, nor did she make Dominic go. "It's enough if we go to confession, when we want to," she would tell young Dom — her little kiss of the wolf.
She wouldn't teach the boy Italian, either — some essential cooking lingo excepted — nor was Dominic inclined to learn the language of "the old country," which to the boy meant the North End of Boston, not Italy. It was both a language and a place that had rejected his mother. Italian would never be Dominic Baciagalupo's language; he said, adamantly, that Boston was nowhere he ever wanted to go. Everything in Annunziata Saetta's new life was defined by a sense of starting over. The youngest of three sisters, she could read and speak English as well as she could cook siciliano. Nunzi taught children how to read in a Berlin elementary school — and after the accident, she took Dominic out of school and taught him some fundamental cooking skills. She also insisted that the boy read books — not just cookbooks but everything she read, which were mostly novels. Her son had been crippled while violating the generally overlooked child-labor laws; Annunziata had taken him out of circulation, her version of homeschooling being both culinary and literary.
Neither area of education was available to Ketchum, who had left school when he was younger than twelve. At nineteen, in 1936, Ketchum could neither read nor write, but when he wasn't working as a logger, he was loading lumber onto the railroad flatcars from the open platforms at the end of the biggest Berlin mill. The deck crew tapered the load at the top, so that the flatcars could safely pass through the tunnels or under the bridges. "That was the extent of my education, before your mom taught me to read," Ketchum enjoyed telling Danny Baciagalupo; the cook would commence to shake his head again, although the story of Dominic's late wife teaching Ketchum to read was apparently incontestable.
At least the saga of Ketchum belatedly learning to read seemed not in the tall-tale category of Ketchum's other stories — the one about the low-roofed bunkhouse at Camp One, for example. According to Ketchum, "some Injun" had been assigned the task of shoveling snow off the roof, but the Indian had neglected the job. When the roof collapsed under the weight of the snow, all but one logger escaped the bunkhouse alive — not the Indian, who was suffocated by what Ketchum called "the concentrated odor of wet socks." (Of course the cook and his son were well aware of Ketchum's nearly constant complaint — namely, that the stink of wet socks was the bane of bunkhouse life.)
"I don't remember an Indian at Camp One," was all Dominic had said to his old friend.
"You're too young to remember Camp One, Cookie," Ketchum had said.
Danny Baciagalupo had often observed that his father bristled at the mere mention of the seven-year age difference between himself and Ketchum, whereas Ketchum was inclined to overemphasize the discrepancy in their ages. Those seven years would have seemed insurmountable to them had the two young men met in the Berlin of their youth — when Ketchum had been a rawboned but strapping nineteen, already sporting a full if ragged beard, and Annunziata's little Dom was not yet a teenager.
He'd been a strong, wiry twelve-year-old — not big, but compact and sinewy — and the cook had retained the appearance of a leanmuscled young logger, although he was now thirty and looked older, especially to his young son. It was his dad's seriousness that made him look older, the boy thought. You could not say "the past" or "the future" in the cook's presence without making him frown. As for the present, even the twelve-year-old Daniel Baciagalupo understood that the times were changing.
Danny knew that his father's life had been changed forever because of an ankle injury; a different accident, to the boy's young mother, had altered the course of his own childhood and changed his dad's life forever again. In a twelve-year-old's world, change couldn't be good. Any change made Danny anxious — the way missing school made him anxious.
On the river drives, in the not-so-old days, when Danny and his dad were working and sleeping in the wanigans, the boy didn't go to school. That he didn't like school — but that he always, and far too easily, made up the work he missed — also made Danny anxious. The boys in his grade were all older than he was, because they skipped school as often as they could and they never made up the work they missed; they'd all been held back and had repeated a grade or two. When the cook saw that his son was anxious, he invariably said: "Stand your ground, Daniel — just don't get killed. I promise you, one day we'll leave here."
But this made Danny Baciagalupo anxious, too. Even the wanigans had felt like home to him. And in TwistedRiver, the twelveyear-old had his own bedroom above the cookhouse — where his father also had a bedroom, and where they shared a bathroom. These were the only second-story rooms in the cookhouse, and they were spacious and comfortable. Each room had a skylight and big windows with a view of the mountains, and — below the cookhouse, at the foothills of the mountains — a partial view of the river basin. Logging trails circumscribed the hills and mountains; there were big patches of meadow and second growth, where the woodcutters had harvested the hardwoods and the coniferous forest. From his bedroom, it seemed to young Daniel Baciagalupo that the bare rock and second growth could never replace the maples and birch, or the softwoods — the spruce and fir, the red and white pine, and the hemlock and tamarack. The twelve-year-old thought that the meadows were running wild with waist-high grass and weeds. Yet, in truth, the forests in the region were being managed for sustainable yields of timber; those woods are still producing — "in the twenty-first-[ expletive] century," as Ketchum would one day say.
And as Ketchum regularly suggested, some things would never change. "Tamarack will always love swamps, yellow birch will forever be highly prized for furniture, and gray birch will never be good for [expletive] except firewood." As for the fact that the river drives in CoosCounty would soon be limited to four-foot pulpwood, Ketchum was morosely disinclined to utter any prophecies. (All the veteran logger would say was that the smaller pulpwood tended to stray out of the current and required cleanup crews.)
What would change the logging business, and what might put an end to the cook's job, was the restless spirit of modernity; the changing times could kill a mere "settlement" like TwistedRiver. But Danny Baciagalupo was just wondering, obsessively: What work would there be in TwistedRiver after the woodcutters moved on? Would the cook then move on? Danny worried. (Could Ketchum ever move on?) As for the river, it just kept moving, as rivers do — as rivers do. Under the logs, the body of the young Canadian moved with the river, which jostled him to and fro — to and fro. If, at this moment in time, Twisted River also appeared restless, even impatient, maybe the river itself wanted the boy's body to move on, too — move on, too.
Continues...
Excerpted from Last Night in TwistedRiver by John Irving Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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