Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

The plot, improbable as it is: Danny, the twelve-year-old son of a logging community’s cook, walks in on his dad and his dad’s lover (Jane), whom he mistakes as a bear. To be fair, Danny’s dad, nicknamed Cookie, gave Danny a tall-tale about fending off a bear (common in the northeast region) from the house before. Danny whacks Jane, under the impression that he was saving his dad from mauling, killing her.

Here’s where it gets complicated. Jane was actually the girlfriend of a renegade sheriff, Carl (called the cowboy–Irving likes his nicknames in the book, and these nicknames are usually connected with what a person does–Cookie, Danny the writer, Ketchum the woodcutter, all used repetitively and definitively throughout the book). Carl has a bit of a temper, and while the death itself doesn’t so much put Danny and Cookie in danger, the fact that Cookie was sleeping with Carl’s girlfriend certainly does.

So they run. The rest of the book (and their lives), Danny and Cookie spend on the run for survival.

The plot loosely provides structure to what the book is actually about.

Which brings me to the premise: The world is full of accidents and tragedies beyond our control, both personal and national (toward the end of the book, 9/11 happens, and some of the ramblings about that event only make sense within this premise of accidents). In other words, the world is a dangerous place.

But Irving doesn’t leave us with this. Because while the accidents and tragedies influence us and may even set our course, what we do with them–the choices we make–define us, and can sometimes even offer us new adventures and new beginnings.

We also have relationships. The father/son relationship is primary in this book, both in the physical father/son bond, but also in the surrogate father/son link. Irving also bookends the book with two “angels,” the first, the character Angel, whose death begins the book (the first of the tragedies, which will also lead to a later new beginning and relationship), and the second, a woman who comes into Danny’s life to take care of him. The first Angel embodies the innocence that his name entails while the second angel is rough-hewn by her own tragedies. In both cases, these characters offer the best of humanity: persons who offer hope in an ugly world. They are the light and salt in the world.

But what kept me reading this book when it rambled on and when I didn’t know where it was headed was the treatise on writing, which seemed to sometimes be more the rational for this book than the plot. Irving affirms that in the accidents and tragedies, we find meaning through storytelling. So throughout the book we see Danny the writer working through his life (and through his tragedies) via his writing. We see what writing offers both as a salve then as an offering to the rest of the world. We see processes and theories of writings. And this is where the book shines for the reader-writer.

While at times I had to convince myself to keep going (shouldn’t the book be over now? I thought on several occasions), and the plot came across contrived at times, the end provided great satisfaction when viewed through the lens of storytelling and relationships–two things that we as Christians and writers have to offer a world of accidents.