John Irving at 67: Great hair! Trim, handsome, clear-eyed, stentorian! What else?
To find out, Irving fans know, one must read the latest Irving novel – his 12th – which, like all of them, appears fantastic, but reliably transmits the latest news on the engrossing business of being John Irving.
Much will be revealed Sunday evening, Oct. 25, in Toronto when Irving reads from his new novel, Last Night in Twisted River, at the International Festival of Authors. When it comes to dramatizing his own writing, IFOA director Geoffrey Taylor notes, “John Irving could put actors out of work.”
The novel opens with a gritty drama set in a northern New Hampshire logging camp 55 years ago, during one of the last of the river drives before trucks and roads tamed the business. The camp at Twisted River is a temporary place populated by rough and wild characters living perilously on the edge of everything. It is a place of rampaging bears, mystical Indians and long knives.
But Last Night in Twisted River soon turns out to be about a middle-aged novelist mourning the death of his only son while, among other things, doing such Irvingish things as eating well at a recognizable midtown Toronto restaurant, studying with Kurt Vonnegut at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and figuring out how to insulate a Georgian Bay cottage sufficiently to permit mid-winter writing excursions.
The Yonge Street restaurant he calls Kiss of the Wolf in the novel is actually Pastis Express, Irving volunteers, its ultrasuave owner a faithful portrait of his “good friend,” Pastis proprietor Georges Gurnon. Irving's son Everett took the photo of the symbolically bent white pine that appears on the cover of the book – showing a view both Irving and his novelist hero, Daniel Baciagalupo, share on the same rocky Pointe au Baril island. As he tells Baciagalupo in the book, Vonnegut really did tell Irving that capitalism might be good to him.
And so it went. Capitalism was very good to both.
On the other hand, Irving insists he shares none of his bestselling hero's contempt, which grows from mild to scathing as the story progresses, for dim-witted journalists who insist on knowing whether or not his apparently autobiographical novels are “really true.”
“That's just a bit of self-referential fooling around,” he says. “Don't hold back.”
Okay: Is Last Night at Twisted River a true story?
“The element of what makes Daniel Baciagalupo, the writer, is very faithfully modelled on me,” he answers easily. He says he feels closer to this one than either of the other two writers who have previously served him as protagonists, especially T.S. Garp, the one who made his reputation. “And those things in his life that have compelled him to live more in his imagination than his life – I think those things are very self-referential.”
One's obsessions as a writer – those things that recur but are unplanned – they just insist upon themselves — John Irving
That much is the same, and so are many other details, including the two writers' birthdates, education and friends. Unlike the fictional writer, who ends up alone in Toronto in static exile, Irving now lives in Vermont with his Canadian wife and their son, close to his other two children and four grandchildren.
But the truly made-up part of Daniel Baciagalupo's story – a steady series of devastating personal losses in a life spent on the run from a crazed killer – also fell close to hand. What happens to his hero is “my worst nightmare,” Irving says.
On that matter, Wikipedia provides a convenient chart plotting Irving novels on one axis against such “recurring themes” as “severing of body parts,” “bears” and “deadly accidents” on the other. Check, check, check for Last Night in Twisted River.
