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John Irving has always called himself an underdog, and he still talks like one — even at 67, even wildly famous as one of America’s great storytellers, even at the release of his 12th novel, certain to be a best-seller.
Maybe he feels goaded. A recent review of “Last Night in Twisted River” used such words as tricked-up, gimmicky, cartoony, cheesy and preposterous — all in the first sentence. (Although the reviewer, the famously harsh New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, kindly followed up with “deeply felt” and “often moving.”)
Irving defends his love for the expansive novel with quirky characters and intricate plots full of surprises, but he doesn’t apologize. Nor does he apologize for recurring Irving-esque elements, including bears, severed body parts and wrestling.
At this point — Irving wrote his first novel more than 40 years ago and became an icon in 1978 with “The World According to Garp” — does he need to?
“Last Night in Twisted River” tells the story of a father and son, Dominic and Danny Baciagalupo. It covers 51 years, as Danny grows from a 12-year-old involved in a gruesome accident to a novelist whose writing career much resembles Irving’s.
We talked to Irving by phone about his new novel and the writing life. Irving lives in Toronto and Vermont and spends part of his summers on an island in Lake Huron. He has three sons, the youngest 18, and four grandchildren.
Q. How long has this novel been in the works?
A. This novel has been in my mind longer than any other, for 20 years. It was always in my mind a fugitive novel about a cook and his pre-teenage son. Something violent happens in the early going of the story and forces them to go on the run. And they are running for more than 50 years.
But I don’t begin a novel on the basis of how long I’ve had it mind.
Q. What is the process?
A. I don’t start writing a novel until I not only see what happens at the end of the story but until I’ve actually written the last sentence. In 12 novels now, that last sentence hasn’t changed, not even the punctuation.
Once I get that sentence, I make a kind of road map for the story back to where I think it should begin. I sort of plot a novel from back to front. When I get the first sentence, however many months after I get the last sentence, only then do I begin writing the book.
That process from getting the last sentence to getting the first sentence sometimes takes a year, sometimes 18 months. Then once I start writing the book, with the fates of my characters already known to me, I’m concentrating on the language.
Q. You’ve written shorter pieces, screenplays, including the one for “The Cider House Rules,” for which you won an Academy Award. But you seem to prefer the sprawling novel. This one covers 50 years of these characters’ lives.
A. I’ll tell you the reason. Passage of time is as important as any major or minor character in 10 of the 12 novels I’ve written. It is one of the reasons I like writing novels, to show the effects of the passage of time on the principal characters. To give the arc of a whole life.
Now the second-longest of my novels is “A Son of the Circus,” and there’s not an appreciable passage of time. One of my shortest novels, “The Fourth Hand,” also falls into that category. But that’s two out of 12.
I’m usually not interested in adapting my novels as screenplays, for the very reason that movies do not do a good job with the passage of time. If you need more than one actor to play a character, the emotional impact on the audience is diffused every time you switch actors.
For “The Cider House Rules,” I saw a way to take the 15 years of the novel and compress the story to a mere 18 months. I saw how to do it without losing the central impact and the central relationship between the old doctor and the young orphan.
Q. Where does that love of this kind of novel come from?
A. My taste comes directly from the novels I read as a teenager, the ones that made me want to be a writer in the first place. They weren’t contemporary novels or remotely modern novels. They were these long, plotted novels of the 19th century: Dickens, Hardy, Melville, Hawthorne.
I loved those stories because the plots were huge. They were larger than life stories, the kind of things that some snotty modernist or postmodernist today would scoff at as improbable or farfetched. Or other people with a sizable lack of imagination.
Q. You and Danny Baciagalupo, who becomes a writer, have an awful lot in common. Does that make this book more autobiographical than the others?
A. My process as a writer, that is, how I write a book, I gave that to Danny. And I gave him what amounts to my biography as a writer, where I went to school, my exact age. And the books Danny writes have an overlapping similarity to some of mine. Those things are easily identifiable, factual things coming from this author’s life.
But most of them, please note, are utterly superficial. It’s not terribly meaningful that Kurt Vonnegut was my teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and I have him as a fictional character in Danny’s life. Those things are more playful or mischievous than they are meaningful.
What to me are the things that are more autobiographical often don’t get pointed out. Danny’s life has nothing to do with anything that has happened to me, but it has everything to do with all that I fear.
Q. I think much more revealing or telling about an author are when you write repeatedly, recurringly about those things that have never happened to you, but which you obviously are terrified of happening to you or to anyone you love.
A. We begin with Danny as a 12-year-old, and he’s already afraid. I have written about losing people and the fear of losing people. There is a nightmare quality to this book, as there is with some of the other novels. So the theme about loss, and the fear of loss, the things which are repeated so often over the course of 12 novels, any psychiatrist would tell you, that stuff is a lot more credibly autobiographical than the occasional reference to wrestling or Iowa.
Q. So why write so often about loss and fear of loss?
A. I don’t think you have any choice as a writer. I think there are these elements in any writer’s life that are in the category not of choice but of obsession. You don’t get to choose your obsessions. They chose you.
Q. There are recurring themes but also familiar devices. When the frying pan is described in the book, readers are thinking that something very John Irving is going to happen with it, right?
A. Why did Shakespeare write about dysfunctional royal families? Nobody got to interview Shakespeare, but if they did, someone probably would have said, “Will, what’s with you and the royalty?”
How many orphans are there in Dickens’ novels? How many sexual mistakes haunt and bring down Hardy’s characters? I look at serious writers, and they always repeat themselves. They can’t help it.
This is a worthwhile caveat for young writers. Melville said woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall.
That’s a good mantra. It means if you write about what terrifies you, the chances are good that the audience will stay alert. They’ll be anxious too. They’ll think, “Here he goes again. He’s made me like this character, now what terrible thing is going to happen to this character.” If I like them, I’m worried about them. Something is going to go wrong. I didn’t invent this pattern.
And I can’t be bothered by those critics who believe all plot is improbable because they also believe plot became old-fashioned sometime before they were born. They think the 19th-century novel is an extinct species, but I disagree. I didn’t invent the kind of storytelling I’m committed to.
Q. Will there be more films from your novels?
A. For all the reasons I’ve said, the only two novels I’m working on screen adaptations are “The Fourth Hand” and “A Son of the Circus.”
Somebody may want to make a movie of “Last Night in Twisted River,” but they won’t do it with me. It’s not the kind of movie I’m interested in. You cannot separate “Twisted River” from its more than 50 years. You can’t take those 50 years out and have anything of the integrity of the whole remain. You can’t take the passage of time out of “Until I Find You.”
People may make movies of those, but they’ll do it without me.
