JOHN IRVING has long been fascinated by the vexed relationship between art and entertainment. In his fourth novel, "The World According to Garp," he describes the "uncanny half-light" that makes "occasional 'serious' books glow, for a time, as also 'popular' books." In his memoir "The Imaginary Girlfriend," he praises Trollope, Dickens, Vonnegut and Heller, writers whose "popular" books have been treated to "serious" critical attention. While he claims to have no patience for Proust, Conrad or Henry James, he is a fierce defender of Graham Greene, whose reputation as an entertaining writer, Irving maintains, "cost him the critical appreciation that is withdrawn from writers with too many readers." Irving's concern about the status of fiction is central to his new novel, "Last Night in Twisted River." There are two main characters in the book: an ItalianAmerican cook who at the beginning goes by the name of Dominic Baciagalupo, and his son, Danny, who grows up to be a "world-famous," "best-selling" author, much like Irving himself. Thanks to Danny's profession, Irving has an excuse for writing about writing, even as he follows Danny and Dominic through 50 years of complicated adventures. "It was a world of accidents," Dominic reflects. The novel opens with the drowning of a young logger who is trying to free a logjam. A surly, coarse, big-hearted older logger named Ketchum breaks his own wrist trying to save him. In the pages that follow, Irving offers the back stories of scores of other accidents associated with logging. We learn that "some rivermen had drowned, or been crushed to death"; a bunkhouse roof had collapsed after a heavy snowfall, killing an Indian; Dominic had broken his ankle as a boy and was maimed for Ufe when he was rolling logs into a mill; and Dominic's wife - Danny's mother - had fallen through the ice one night when she'd gone dancing across the frozen river. In this world of accidents, Dominic and Danny struggle to find steady footing, but like the inexperienced young logger who falls into the river, they keep losing their balance. In their well-meaning effort to protect each other, they make mistakes that are sometimes inevitable, or harmlessly comical or, in the pivotal moment in the novel, fatal. In Coos County, N.H., 1954, in a logging camp along the Twisted River, Dominic's mistake is to hide the truth about his affair with an American Indian woman known as "Injun Jane" from his young son. Danny, in his youthful ignorance, walks in on his father and Injun Jane while they're having sex. Injun Jane, like several other female characters in this novel, is distinguished by her hefty physique and, in particular, her "monumental" breasts. She also has long black hair, which Danny has never before seen unbraided. But she unbraids it that night. When Danny walks into the dark bedroom, drawn by the "violent creaks and moans," he thinks Injun Jane is a bear attacking his father, and he hits her with an iron skillet. He hits her hard. It's a big whoops, and it's used to set the action of the novel in motion. Danny and Dominic will run from this mistake for the rest of their lives. The scene is obviously improbable, and Injun Jane remains a blank of a character. Readers may not be convinced that this accident deserves to be the propelling event of the book. But there's more at work than just plot here. At the same time that we are reading about Dominic and Danny as they run from town to town (both of them change their names along the way), we are reading about how, and why, the story came to be written. The narrator tells us, for instance, that "all writers must know how to distance themselves, to detach themselves from this and that emotional moment, and Danny could do this - even at 12." He tells us that one day "the writer would recognize the near simultaneity of connected but dissimilar momentous events - these are what move a story forward." He explains that Danny's novels involve "small, domestic tragedies," in which "the villain - if there was one - was more often human nature than the United States." After a section in which the fictional events are intertwined with the events of Sept. 11, Danny comes right out and explains, "I'm a fiction writer - meaning that I won't ever write about the Sept. 11 attacks, though I may use those events, when they're not so current, and then only in the context of a story of my own devising." Not only does the narrator explain Danny's methods with unprovocative truisms, he also packages his characters in simplistic generalizations. In case we doubt it, he assures us that "Danny was both observant and smart." Later on, following a trajectory that will be familiar to readers of some of Irving's other work, Danny goes to the elite private school Phillips Exeter on a scholarship. Why is he singled out for a scholarship? Because he "simply had a gift for storytelling." And in a passage that's supposed to be one of the emotional culminations of the novel, the narrator explains that Danny (now a father himself) "couldn't change what had happened to his son, the way a fiction writer could revise a novel." There's plenty of evidence of Irving's agility as a writer in "Last Night in Twisted River." He is adept at following an accident through its intricate consequences. His evocations of sounds and smells and tactile sensations, especially those provoked by Dominic's expert cooking, are tantalizing. And some of the comic moments are among the most memorable that Irving has written, including the scene when a naked female skydiver, one of the novel's many voluptuaries, makes an unfortunate landing smack in the middle of a pigpen. Given Irving's skill, it's especially frustrating to see him working so hard to spell out the import of the fiction. Even if some of the explanations are meant to be inflected with irony (we shouldn't necessarily believe everything this narrator tells us), they still aren't convincingly integrated with the events and characters. The coy hints of connections between the author and the narrator have been forced onto a plot that can't accommodate them, and the fact that Danny is a famous novelist too often seems a mere contrivance, giving Irving a convenient opportunity to include rambling background information and to air his own ideas about writing. In his bid to make something "serious," Irving has risked distracting readers from what otherwise could be a moving, cohesive story.

Irving's latest work (after Until I Find You) concerns a writer (Daniel) and his cook-father (Dominic) who had to flee their not-so-beloved New Hampshire town after young Dan accidentally killed Dominic's lover, Jane, mistaking her for a bear and hitting her with an iron pan (not played for laughs). For nearly 50 years, they evade the only cop in town (Carl, who was in love with Jane), finally ending up in Canada, where a violent act compels the survivors to change their names and abandon friends, except for Ketchum, a gun-toting liberal (note the inverse cliche) who gives the novel its great charm. Part drama, part thriller, Irving's 12th novel keeps the reader active because of the long digressions about book critics who spend too much time psychoanalyzing fiction writers (Irving's metagripes?) and the fact that many of Danny's books resemble Irving's. He has us psychoanalyzing anyway-which may be the point. Verdict Irving's latest is interesting, funny, and original-but also self-indulgent and highly digressive, with more backstory than story. If the author weren't so concerned with the minutiae of his characters' lives, this could have been a few hundred pages shorter, probably better, and a whole lot less skeptical of readers' intelligence. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/09.]-Stephen Morrow, Athens, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Irving (The World According to Garp) returns with a scattershot novel, the overriding themes, locations and sensibilities of which will probably neither surprise longtime fans nor win over the uninitiated. Dominic "Cookie" Baciagalupo and his son, Danny, work the kitchen of a New Hampshire logging camp overlooking the Twisted River, whose currents claimed both Danny's mother and, as the novel opens, mysterious newcomer Angel Pope. Following an Irvingesque appearance of bears, Cookie and Danny's "world of accidents" expands, precipitating a series of adventures both literary and culinary. The ensuing 50-year slog follows the Baciagalupos from a Boston Italian restaurant to an Iowa City Chinese joint and finally a Toronto French cafe, while dovetailing clumsily with Danny's career as the distinctly Irving-like writer Danny Angel. The story's vicariousness is exacerbated by frequent changes of scene, self-conscious injections of how writers must "detach themselves" and a cast of invariably flat characters. With conflict this meandering and characters this limp, reflexive gestures come off like nostalgia and are bound to leave readers wishing Irving had detached himself even more. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Irving's new doorstopper (Until I Find You, 2006, etc.) addresses a strong themethe role accident plays in even the most carefully planned and managed livesbut doesn't always stick to the subject. His logjam of a narrative focuses on the life and times of Danny Baciagalupo, who navigates the roiling waters of growing up alongside his widowed father Dominic, a crippled logging-camp cook employed by a company that plies its dangerous trade along the zigzag Twisted River, north of New Hampshire's Androscoggin River in Robert Frost's old neighborhood of Coos County. The story begins swiftly and compellingly in 1954, when a river accident claims the life of teenaged Canadian sawmill worker Angel Pope, whom none of his co-workers really know. Irving's characters live in a "world of accidents" whose by-products include Dominic's maiming and the death of his young wife in a mishap similar to Angel's. All is nicely done throughout the novel's assured and precisely detailed early pages. But trouble looms and symbols clash when Danny mistakenly thinks a constable's lady friend is a bear, and admirers of The Cider House Rules (1985) and A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) will anticipate that Large Meanings prowl these dark woods. The narrative flattens out as we follow the Baciagalupos south to Boston, thence to Iowa (where we're treated to a lengthy account of Danny's studies, surely not unlike Irving's own, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop), and an enormity of specifics and generalizations about Danny's career as bestselling author "Danny Angel." The tale spans 50 years, and Danny's/Irving's penchant for commentary on the psyche, obligations and disappointments of the writer's life makes those years feel like centuries. Will entertain the faithful and annoy readers who think this author has already written the same novel too many times. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* Veteran novelist Irving's twelfth novel is full to bursting with story, character, and emotion. It follows a cook, Dominic, and his son, Danny, over 50 years, from New Hampshire's backwoods to Boston's North End to Toronto's Yonge Street. At once a moving portrait of a father-and-son relationship, a homage to a quintessentially American fortitude forged by treacherous work and scant wages, and a tribute to the bonds of friendship, it offers multiple, beautifully written set pieces on grief, love, food, and family. It all begins, as Irving's novels usually do, with a bear; add to that a frying pan, a naked Native American woman, and a freak accident, which sends the cook and his son on the run for decades as they are relentlessly pursued by a mean-spirited, abusive sheriff; their only tie to the logging camp where Dominic was employed is his best friend, Ketchum, a veteran river driver and cantankerous libertarian. As Irving moves the plot through the decades, Dominic works in numerous kitchens and cuisines, finally opening his own restaurant; Danny becomes a best-selling novelist with a son of his own; and Ketchum, being Ketchum, grows ever more independent and obstinate, still camping outdoors in subzero temperatures while well into his seventies. Irving is a natural-born storyteller with a unique and compelling authorial voice. He shapes his over-the-top plot and larger-than-life characters into an artful reflection of how the past informs the present, both for the unforgettable trio at the heart of his novel and the flawed but indomitable country they live in.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2009 Booklist