The Globe and Mail

In his 1996 collection Trying To Save Piggy Sneed, John Irving wrote that his friend and mentor, the late Kurt Vonnegut, once asked him if he thought there was something “intrinsically funny” about words like peek and peer, which he felt Irving used to the point of “self-conscious cuteness.” Irving admitted that Vonnegut was right about the cuteness, which pervaded his first five novels to an alarming, though hilarious, degree, but which began to fade with The Cider House Rules and was largely gone by A Widow for One Year.

In Last Night in Twisted River, Irving's 12th novel, his style is anything but cute. Throughout the 1970s and '80s, the old Irving played with language the way a kitten plays with yarn, but the 21st-century Irving uses it to weave a serious yet colourful tapestry of love, guilty consciences, broken hearts and triumphant survival.

The result is a flawed but mature work by one of our most accomplished writers. Though it unfortunately lacks the gleeful abandon and glib joie de vivre of his first several books, and mercifully lacks the plodding flatness of his next few, we are consoled by the sage, musing style of a man who wishes to make some sense of the passions and fears that have held him in a death grip for nearly 70 years.

Twisted River is about the relationships among three men: Dominic Baciagalupo, an Italian-American cook with a warm heart and a bad limp; his son, Danny, who resembles his father, save for the limp; and the outdoorsy, hard-drinking Ketchum, their friend and protector. In 1954, after an inadvertent tragedy, Dominic and Danny flee the rural New Hampshire logging camp where they lived in order to escape the wrath of a bad cop named Constable Carl.

Ketchum stays behind to throw their nemesis off the trail, then spends the next five decades apprising them of Constable Carl's progress in finding them, as father and son bounce around New England, thence to the Midwest, and finally to Toronto. Amid all this, Danny gets a scholarship to Exeter, after which he goes to university and becomes a famous novelist, his career mirroring every step of Irving's own.

In fact, as much as this is a story about love and loss, it also seems to be a story about John Irving. Readers familiar with Irving's life will find the number of similarities not only striking but perhaps even perplexing, for in places it seems that he chose not to invent a fictional life for his co-protagonist but to model Danny literally after himself. It is in these passages, especially in the middle third of the book, that the story feels bogged down.

Danny's fourth novel is a big success, as was Irving's; Danny teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, as did Irving; Danny writes the endings to his books first, as Irving is wont to do; and on and on. Some of Irving's fellow authors even appear, undisguised, as friends of Danny's. Vonnegut makes two cameos, and we also briefly encounter the late John Cheever, the late Raymond Carver and the poet Marvin Bell. When reality intrudes upon fiction like this, the result is often jarring, a puncturing of the pleasant illusion that is one of the purposes of reading. Readers might be forgiven for wondering at points why Irving didn't simply write another memoir, for that is partly what Twisted River seems to be.