Writing about writing

In his latest, John Irving serves up a meditation, with abundant plot twists, on why novelists do what they do

October 25, 2009|Floyd Skloot

John Irving’s career as a novelist began in 1968, with the publication of “Setting Free the Bears.’’ The career of novelist Danny Angel, the main character in Irving’s new novel, “Last Night in Twisted River,’’ spans the same 41 years.

This is not a casual gesture on Irving’s part. To further entangle author and character, Irving creates obvious career parallels: Angel becomes an international success in the late 1970s with his fourth novel, as Irving did with his fourth, “The World According to Garp’’; Angel publishes an “abortion novel’’ called “East of Bangor’’ in the mid-1980s just as Irving published “The Cider House Rules’’; cameos are made by well-known colleagues of Irving’s such as Kurt Vonnegut, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Marvin Bell, and Salman Rushdie; Boston, Vermont, New Hampshire, Iowa City, and Toronto figure prominently, as do wrestling, teaching, and engagement in the film world. Clearly, we are meant to recognize the congruence.

Further, as the story progresses we discover that the book we are reading is being written by its main character - “Last Night in Twisted River’’ by John Irving is “Last Night in Twisted River’’ by Danny Angel (well, by Daniel Baciagalupo, who has been publishing novels under the name of Danny Angel - in case the confusion and mingling of identities has not gone far enough).

The metafictional, self-reflexive business is in part a tease. While inviting a reader to focus on autobiographical elements, it allows Irving, in the voice of Angel, to protest the way his “fiction had been ransacked for every conceivably autobiographical scrap’’ and “dissected and overanalyzed for whatever could be construed as the virtual memoirs hidden inside them.’’ Except for Irving’s failure to name Danny Angel John Irving, this is all very Philip Roth.

But Irving’s purpose in this, his 12th novel, goes well beyond fictional experimentation. “Last Night in Twisted River’’ is about the forces that shape a writer’s life, that create literary sensibility and the compulsion to use writing as a way of managing life’s essential chaos and randomness: To make sense of this “world of accidents,’’ coincidences, and the disorder inherent in human violence. Thus it is also about - and enacts for the reader - the process by which a writer shapes his life, as Danny makes use of the experiences we witness and confronts the things that most frighten him: “Daniel was absolutely terrified of something happening to his loved ones; he simply obsessed about that subject. That was where the writer’s fearful imagination came from - childhood terrors.’’