John Irving is an expert storyteller, and a deliberate one. The author, in Denver to promote his latest book, “Last Night in Twisted River,” talked about his novels and his writing process during a sit-down at a local bookstore.
Irving said the new novel had been on his mind for the past 20 years, maybe longer, and that he knew quite a bit about the story before actually writing it. He said, “I knew there was a cook and a preteenage son. The preteenage part was important.”
He knew that the setting was going to be a logging camp or a fishing village, “one of those frontier, rudimentary kinds of places.” He also knew that it would be set close to the Canadian border and that one of the characters would be a bad cop.
And, most important, he knew that he wanted the boy, Danny, to grow up to become a writer. “I wanted his own childhood and adolescence to be instrumental in making him a writer. I imagined this boy would be more comfortable in his imagination than in his own skin.
“And though he would never be happy or successful in his personal life,” he went on, “in his imagination he would find a place to live — almost in lieu of being any good at the real-life things. I also knew that I would give him, as faithfully, my process as a writer, my education, biography as a writer. There the similarity would stop.
“In his personal life, (Danny) had a life wholly unlike mine. Everything that I was afraid of had happened to him. If you look at Danny, everything he’s afraid of comes true.”
While waiting for this one to gel, Irving said, he began and published books about people he had known far less about, who had been in his mind not nearly as long. This one, however, was held back.
“I knew there was a third man, I didn’t see him clearly,” he said. “This guy who befriended the cook and the cook’s son, and he loved the cook, but there was something about the relationship that was conflictive and even combative. There was something about the relationship with the cook and third man that the boy didn’t know.
“I didn’t know who this guy was. I didn’t get his story for the longest time. Ketchum is such an important character to this novel. I felt him like an absence. He was missing from the party. He had to be there.”
First and last
Irving’s writing process is, by now, well documented. He starts with a novel’s final sentence and works his way to the beginning. “That process for me, from the last sentence to a first sentence that always comes last, that process can take a year,” he said, adding that when he arrives at the beginning, he knows “the fates of my characters, when they meet, if their paths cross again, if they live or die. It is a pretty rudimentary plot, it doesn’t have a lot of detail, but it has all the action and all the characters are there. In engineering terms, it would be the scaffolding of a building that has not yet been built.”
That final sentence in “Last Night in Twisted River” was problematic. Irving said, “Before I get that last sentence, I usually have some forewarning regarding its tone of voice. I know something about how it sounds before this sentence emerges. I know if it’s lyrical, a pretty kind of sentence.”
In “The Cider House Rules,” Irving said he knew the closing line — “Goodnight, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England” — was a prayer, an echo of a benediction, long before he had the actual words.
“What confused me in the case of this book (‘Twisted River’), the last sentence sounded elated, even upbeat, excited — but I knew the story.
“I knew of my main characters, the only one left standing would be Danny. What would Danny have to be happy about? He’s lost everyone he loves. I thought I was mistaken. I thought there was something more than the third man that I didn’t know. I just kept beginning other novels because those last sentences were more directly forthcoming. With them, I had that necessary starting point. For the longest time (with ‘Twisted River’), I didn’t.”
At one point in the novel, the teenage Danny is budding as a writer, and he wonders about the place of coincidence in stories. Irving writes, “He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there are no coincidences.”
Irving said the observation is very true when it comes to his own writing process. His novels, he said, are plotted before he writes and that “I might make the 32nd thing happen 33rd, but it’s nothing of consequence. The point is, by the time I start to write the novel, there are no coincidences to me. I know what everyone’s fate is.”
19th-century model
His work is modeled on the novels he read as a teen, the 19th century fiction of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, works he described as plotted with long-developed characters. He said, “There were no coincidences in them either.”
Irving went on to talk about “Great Expectations,” in which Pip believes Miss Havisham is his benefactor, leading the reader to believe it as well, despite the fact that she hates men and boys.
Irving said, “I was 17 when I read ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge.’ The first chapter is the best chapter; he sells his wife and daughter to the sailor. I had no idea what he was in for. That’s the point, no matter what he does does him no good; he can never recover from that. That’s not a coincidence either.”
“So,” he said, “the 19th century has always been the model of the form for me. It’s irritating to me, to see how much modern criticism has — is — utterly biased against the 19th century novel. . . . Plot has been disparaged since I became a writer.”
To Irving, though, and almost certainly to his readers, plot is indispensable. “Plot was the greatest device to be given the novel, he said. “I do not know better novels, I do not know a better period of the novel, than the 19th century. Modern criticism disregards these.
“Did Sophocles not have plot? The Oedipus Cycle, it took three plays, but eventually even the children are going to die. Does Shakespeare have plots? Does Hamlet have a plot?”
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writing living in Centennial.
