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Last Night in Twisted River: A Novel |  | Author: John Irving
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $28.00
Buy New: $10.97
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Rating:  57 reviews
Sales Rank: 78
Format: Deckle Edge
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 576
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.6
ISBN: 1400063841
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781400063840
ASIN: 1400063841
Publication Date: October 27, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, October 2009: A long, delicious trip to the land of Irving is hands-down the best way to begin the month of October. A trio of tragic events (though the prize for most hell-shocking goes to the third) exiles widower and camp cook Dominic Baciagalupo and his son Danny from a mid-century logging outpost called Twisted River. They leave behind the Bunyan-esque lumberjack Ketchum--a gruff, eccentric, dyed-in-the-wool Yankee--who remains their sole connection to the past. What's next neither father nor son knows: their rootless existence moves swiftly in and out of New England, tied ostensibly to jobs for Dominic and schools for Danny, but it seems one foot is always back in those New Hampshire woods. Theirs is a restless, richly observed journey, crowned by a reckoning no one could predict. Few writers can match John Irving's knack for denouement, and in Last Night in Twisted River, his extraordinary ending is made all the more powerful by a story that feasts on language, life, and love. --Anne Bartholomew
Product Description
In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable’s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County–to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto–pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them.
In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River–John Irving’s twelfth novel–depicts the recent half-century in the United States as “a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.” From the novel’s taut opening sentence–“The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long”–to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the historical authenticity and emotional authority of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is also as violent and disturbing a story as John Irving’s breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp.
What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author’s unmistakable voice–the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller. Near the end of this moving novel, John Irving writes: “We don’t always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly–as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth–the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.”
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 57
 A Tortured Read November 27, 2009
Francis J. Duffy (Hilton Head Island)
When a person writes timeless classics like The World According to Garp (Modern Library),The Cider House Rules: A Novel (Modern Library),The Hotel New Hampshire (Ballantine Reader's Circle),and A Son of the Circus (Ballantine Reader's Circle) it is hard to imagine that their skills can be diminished over time. Regretfully Last Night in Twisted River: A Novel, John Irving's third straight disappointment, demonstrates that genius too may be a non renewable resource. Twisted River is burdened with excessive and meaningless dialogue, numerous boring chracters, name changes and time shifts that make for a burdensome and convoluted read. The tortured and excessive dialogue makes the main characters tedious and not remotely likeable or even believeable. The reader gets the impression that Irving is being compensated by word count. In addition he could not resist forcing his political views, awkwardly, into the laborious last 100 pages. This self-conscious intrusion made finishing the book a taxing chore. The books final romantic 'payoff' is a pathetically thin major disappointment. John Irving set his own gold standard over the past 40 years, it's a shame that it now appears he is no longer able to deliver at that lofty level.
 Entertaining But Not His Best November 26, 2009
HighFlighter
"Last Night In Twisted River" continues with familiar events from previous John Irving novels: automobile accident involving oral sex, violence with squash rackets, abortions, wrestling, etc. The story of a lumber camp cook and his son holds one attention well enough - John Irving is a fine writer - but after you've read the 554 pages you wish you had waited to check it out at the library rather than fork out a few bucks. The best part of the novel is the beginning, including descriptions of logging, river drives, and the rough, hard-drinking characters of the Northeast logging camps. The most awkward and ill-fitting parts of the novel are toward the end when Irving peppers his characters' dialogue with anti-Bush screeds, obviously reflecting his own personal views. Entertaining but not his best.
 Last Night at Twisted River November 25, 2009
Terry Anderson (Salina, Kansas United States)
I love John Irving, and I couldn't put this book down. However, using September 11 to make a political statement went too far and the book lasts a little too long without a satisfying ending. Without giving the climax of the book away, I have to say that its resolution was just too political and though you can tell that Ketchum is a character that Irving cares a great deal about, he is far too much the focus of the end of the book. What makes this book great to read is the relationship between father and son. I recommend the book. Just skim the last 100 pages or so.
Takes the Long Way Around, But Still Good November 24, 2009
Katherine (Massachusetts/ Connecticut)
As are all Irving novels, they are definitely just that- novels. They are not stories, but more of detailed reenactments- sometimes over the course of someone's entire life- from small childhood to their 80s. "Last Night in Twisted River" does not deter from this formula.
We meet Danny at the young age of (I believe it was?) 8. We get to know his father Dominic very well in the first chapters, as well as a very large supporting character Ketchum. They live in a wooded area in New Hampshire where logging is a way of life. Dominic is the cook for the loggers and Danny is forced to get an education, even though no one else in the area does. Ketchum is smart mouthed and very political in his thinking- in that politics are bull and that everyone dealing with politics are uneducated and stupid.
The last night in Twisted River takes place when Danny is 12 years old. His father (a widower for over ten years) is banging the diswasher, Injun Jane. A very unfortunate (and in a typically Irving fashion) incident happens where the boy and his father need to run from town. Injun is unhappily in a relationship with abusive Carl the cop and if he found out that the cook and Jane were having relations, he would surely kill Dominic and his boy, Danny. So, they run. For years and years and years. "Last Night in Twisted River" is a very detailed, sometimes harrowing, story of Danny and Dominic's life as they move from place to place- meet different kinds of people- and try to stay away from Carl the ex-cop who wants their blood. Ketchum is their mentor for when Carl is out looking for them.
"Twisted River" is a good book, but if you're considering getting into Irving, I wouldn't suggest this one as a starter. Try "A Prayer for Owen Meany", "The World According to Garp", "The Fourth Hand", or even "The 158-Pound Marriage". Those flow more easily and the audience can feel the emotions and relate to the characters much better in those than in Irving's past two novels ("Twisted River" and "Until I Find You")
The plot is good for this book. By the end of the story, I've really gotten attached to the lead characters and am sad to see anything terrible happen to them.
However, there are some things that I can't tell, for sure, if Irving is simply over analysing his work, or if he's mocking his writing. It seemed like every single time that Danny was mentioned, it looked like this:
"Danny Angel, formerly Daniel Baciapulco, the writer" or
"Tony, formerly Dominic Baciapulco, Cookie, the writer's father"
It got tiring to read that every single time. I was tempted to read the book with a pen and paper handy to keep all the names straight! Every time I thought I had it figured out, his repetition of the past names would confuse me again.
Also, why is it necessary for me to know the first and LAST names of every person that Danny or Dominic encounter? It just gets tedious to read. I don't care that his neighbor's last name is this or that. The characters are hardly mentioned in passing, so why crowd my memory with this useless information? I would guess there are over 50 characters in this book that I had to know the first and last names of- as well as "meet" their children and their pets. It became too much and I ended up just skimming over the names because I knew that in a few pages, it wouldn't matter anyway.
There were times when extreme tragedy would happen to Danny or Dominic, and it would just be metioned. Someone died and it was just mentioned as an afterthought- "Two years after ___ died, Danny was in his house writing..." and I found myself skimming backward to figure out when that had happened? Did I miss it? I would have loved less of the neighbor's lives and more of the main charaters' huge events.
Honestly, Katie was a great character because she was memorable- and she was hardly in the book!
So, in the end, "Last Night in Twisted River" was worth the read. I found myself highlighting passages that I wanted to stay with me after I was done w the book, and I laughed out loud at some parts, cried at others. It is a detailed story filled with bears, sexual experiences that usually are offensive, and the entire life of Danny from young child to elderly age. "Twisted River" is a typical Irving novel... but still not his best.
 Bush bashing taking the fiction route November 24, 2009
Cactus thorn (Glendale, Az.)
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
I didn't like this book at the start. Irving goes round and round to tell his story, but as I read more, I got involved with it. I was liking it up to the point where the author started bashing George Bush. If I wanted to read more bashing, I would just pick up any newspaper. It is unfair to people who buy this book to listen to characters malign the previous president. I expect this animosity from liberal columnists, but I don't appreciate it in my fiction reading. If you have any respect for any president we've ever elected to office, don't buy this book. If for no other reason than our elected presidents deserve respect. I won't ever buy another Irving book. Who knows who he'll bash the next time.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 57
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