Last Night in Twisted River: Synopsis

Here's a more complete synopsis than previously available, found here:

"Last Night in Twisted River is the newest novel — John Irving’s twelfth — from one of the best-known and best-loved authors in the English language. 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 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.'”

And here's an interesting chart from Irving's Wikipedia entry, detailing the author's recurring themes.

Still More John Irving

According to Iowa's Gazette, "'Last Night in Twisted River,' Irving said, is a fugitive story about a cook and his son who are 'running away from someone.' The books appears to span at least two generations, since the son, Danny, grows up to become a famous novelist who, like Irving, attended the UI Writers' Workshop in the late '60s.

The chapter Irving read is set in and around Iowa City during the time Danny attended the workshop. Irving said the chapter doesn't have much to do with the novel's overall narrative, but was necessary because he needed to think up a situation that caused Danny to stop drinking.

In the chapter, titled 'Lady Sky,' 25-year-old Danny, his philandering wife, Katie, and their 2-year-old son, Joe, attend an artists' party at a pig farm in Tiffin. For entertainment, the host hires a woman to parachute on to the farm naked. But all hell breaks loose when the parachutist lands in pig manure.

The chapter ends with Danny and Katie waking up the next day terribly hung over and discovering that their son had wandered out of their Iowa Avenue duplex and almost got hit by a car. The thought of his son almost ending up 'dead in the road,' the chapter's last words, causes Danny to stop drinking."

Last Night in Twisted River

Here's a synopsis of the forthcoming John Irving novel, due October 27, 2009 from Random House (or a week earlier in Canada), ganked from his Canadian agent:

Last Night in Twisted River is the newest novel — John Irving’s twelfth — from one of the best-known and best-loved authors in the English language.

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 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.”

And here's a British TV interview from May 2008

John Irving Update!

British and Canadian rights to new novel announced; October 2009 hardcover publication.

(from Publisher's Lunch 12/2/08 ) "John Irving's Last Night in Twisted River, set in a New Hampshire sawmill settlement, spanning five decades, as the central character and his 12-year-old son become fugitives after a case of mistaken identity, to Louise Dennys at Knopf Canada; to Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury UK, for hardcover publication in October 2009; and to Bill Scott-Kerr at Transworld for paperback, by Dean Cooke at The Cooke Agency."

Here's a recent interview with the author.