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–John Irving’s twelfth novel–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.”
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