Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

Reading 554 pages in a week was a challenge but I was determined and somehow found the time between writing and researching and doing mom stuff. But before I get to thoughts on this book I need to re-visit the inspiration for this blog. An article in the NYT this fall featured a woman who read a book a day for one year. Three hundred and sixty five books in 365 days, she for the most part limited her book lengths to 300 pages (and yes she does have kids but I believe they are in school full time.. well they’d have to be wouldn’t they?) but after taking on our ‘book a week’ experiment for just 5 weeks I’ve begun to believe that she is lying. Let me explain. My goal with reading 300 page books in a week is to read 50 pages a day. Doable for a stay at home mom who works a bit from home and makes her own hours (and is a night owl). But sometimes, life gets in the way, Take last weekend for instance. We went ski shopping in the morning, had a basketball game in the afternoon and dinner out, far from a full day but our schedule made my 50 pages a challenge. So HOW IN THE HECK does ‘book a day’ blogger read 300 pages a day EVERY DAY for a year. That whole year did she never skied for 3 hours, then cuddled up and watched a movie with her kids? Or spent the afternoon with her sister shopping and then later getting drunk at dinner. How about visiting her ailing aunt for the morning? I know she’s gotten book deals and has a blog on The Huffington Post now because of all her reading and hooray for her, but what else did she accomplish that year? My guess is not much

I’ve always been a John Irving fan. “Prayer for Owen Meany” is laugh out loud funny and I also loved “Garp”, “Cider House Rules” and “Until I Found You”. All of his books are epic in length and tone, spanning decades. This one was no exception. It’s the 5 decade long story of Danny and his dad Dominick (“the cook”) who lived in the logging town of Twisted River until the 12 year old Danny killed Dominick’s lover, Jane, mistaking her for a bear. Unfortunately Jane was also the lover of the local, evil town cop, Constable Carl. This act sets Danny and Dominick off on the run, moving from Boston to Colorado to Toronto, living incognito for decades, with Dominick working in various restaurants, always fearful that evil Constable Carl would find them. Their adventures are typical John Irving fare; grisly accidents, obsessions with quirky women, oddball characters and of course bears.

That Danny becomes a best-selling author who writes fiction but is in fact writing the book we’re reading, makes it all the more fun for those of us trying to have a go at writing ourselves. He (Danny) writes: "In any work of fiction weren’t those things that had really happened to the writer – or perhaps, to someone, the writer had intimately known – more authentic, more verifiably true, than anything anyone could imagine? (This was a common belief, even though a fiction writer’s job was imagining truly, a whole story – as Danny had subversively said, whenever he was given the opportunity to defend the fiction in fiction writing – because real-life stories were never whole, never complete in the ways that novels could be.)” He writes his novels by writing his last line first and first line last. So the book ended, appropriately, back at the beginning…

His characters are endearing, like Ketchum, cook’s best friend who spent his life in sadness because he couldn’t save the lives of those he loved and Ketchum’s sometime girlfriend Six Pack Pam, a ‘hooker with a heart of gold’ who could take down any male in town. Danny eventually goes through multiple tragedies because of his and his father’s actions decades earlier but his journey, living (and writing) ‘in a world of accidents’ was worth the few late nights and skipped meetings in order to finish.