The details don’t always make for riveting reading: “Before the advent of mechanical loaders, the logs were unloaded by releasing trip bunks on the sides of the trucks - this allowed an entire load to roll off a truck at once.” Irving, who has always been fond of exploring specific processes and professions, delves deeply into the mechanics of the dangerous logging industry.

Spanning five decades, “Last Night” begins, somewhat fitfully, in 1954 in a flyspeck logging settlement in New Hampshire where a widowed cook, Dominic Baciagalupo, and his 12-year-old son Danny prepare meals for the rough-hewed men who work and live there. The temptation to label “Last Night in Twisted River” as a return to form is considerable, especially in the wake of Irving’s previous two books, the underwhelming “The Fourth Hand” and the bloated, exasperating “Until I Find You.” The new story abounds with melancholic humor and comic absurdity, and its themes amount to a greatest-hits recap of his 11 previous novels.īut Irving is bent on more than just giving readers what they want. Like so much of Irving’s work, “Last Night in Twisted River” unfolds in “a world of accidents” and coincidences and random bad luck, beginning with the first sentence and the soon-to-be-fallen Angel Pope: “The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long.” And everyone must share the burden of those misfortunes - and learn to accept grief and mourning as life’s permanent counterbalances to joy. “It was an accident,” a character declares after the unfortunate death that triggers the plot of “Last Night in Twisted River.” “It’s nobody’s fault.” Because we’re in a John Irving novel, tragedy is practically guaranteed to follow.

The fourth hand book review