Take a photo of a barcode or cover
karieh13 's review for:
Last Night in Twisted River
by John Irving
Many, if not most books, end by the completion of a circle. There is a reference, a plot device, a theme that takes the reader back to the beginning of the book, a feeling that the loop has been closed. In “Last Night in Twisted River”, John Irving has taken the reader back to the beginning (and middle and end) of the story so many times that there is no sense of fulfillment. Indeed, there is a sense of relief that finally, this long, circuitous journey has come to some sort of end.
I LOVED “The World According to Garp” and very much enjoyed “A Widow for One Year”. I was very disappointed by Irving’s latest book. There is no continuous story arc that I could hold on to. At times, I had no idea in what year or what state the story was occurring. The time and place jumps sometimes seem to happen in the same paragraph. There are several narratives going on, in several different decades, in many different states and some of them may (or may not) be the stories being created by one of the main characters…I simply couldn’t follow. Oh, and the main characters change their names a few times, which didn’t help my confusion.
One of the main plot points is that a father and son are on the run from a violent man in their past, yet there isn’t enough of a threat given to the reader to build any sort of suspense. Also, Dominic (father) and Daniel (son) are able to live out decades of normal life in each place they live – with little or no daily worry that they will be found by their pursuer.
Writing this type of review for an author whose work I greatly admire, feels awful. I keep going back to the book, trying to figure out what I missed. There are a few times I brushed up against the style that I remember.
“Maybe this moment of speechlessness helped to make Daniel Baciagalupo become a writer. All those moments when you know you should speak, but you can’t think of what to say – as a writer, you can never give enough attention to those moments.”
And “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.”
But those moments are too few and far between. The bulk of the book is a mix of too much detail about minor things like meals, and not enough detail about things like the death of major characters. Then the last quarter turns into a political rant (mostly from a character that was unable to read through most of his life but who then becomes an authority on George W. Bush), and in the end, it is a relief to be done.
“He’d lost so much that was dear to him, but Danny knew how stories were marvels – how they simply couldn’t be stopped.”
Some stories are marvels, John Irving stories are marvels, and I look forward to his next one…but this one, for me, was not.
I LOVED “The World According to Garp” and very much enjoyed “A Widow for One Year”. I was very disappointed by Irving’s latest book. There is no continuous story arc that I could hold on to. At times, I had no idea in what year or what state the story was occurring. The time and place jumps sometimes seem to happen in the same paragraph. There are several narratives going on, in several different decades, in many different states and some of them may (or may not) be the stories being created by one of the main characters…I simply couldn’t follow. Oh, and the main characters change their names a few times, which didn’t help my confusion.
One of the main plot points is that a father and son are on the run from a violent man in their past, yet there isn’t enough of a threat given to the reader to build any sort of suspense. Also, Dominic (father) and Daniel (son) are able to live out decades of normal life in each place they live – with little or no daily worry that they will be found by their pursuer.
Writing this type of review for an author whose work I greatly admire, feels awful. I keep going back to the book, trying to figure out what I missed. There are a few times I brushed up against the style that I remember.
“Maybe this moment of speechlessness helped to make Daniel Baciagalupo become a writer. All those moments when you know you should speak, but you can’t think of what to say – as a writer, you can never give enough attention to those moments.”
And “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.”
But those moments are too few and far between. The bulk of the book is a mix of too much detail about minor things like meals, and not enough detail about things like the death of major characters. Then the last quarter turns into a political rant (mostly from a character that was unable to read through most of his life but who then becomes an authority on George W. Bush), and in the end, it is a relief to be done.
“He’d lost so much that was dear to him, but Danny knew how stories were marvels – how they simply couldn’t be stopped.”
Some stories are marvels, John Irving stories are marvels, and I look forward to his next one…but this one, for me, was not.