'Last Night in Twisted River:' a father and son, a vendetta and a naked lady parachutist

"Last Night in Twisted River"

by John Irving

Random House, 554 pp., $28

Fans of John Irving who relish the mutilations he inflicts on characters might be delighted to learn that his 12th novel opens in a 1954 New Hampshire logging camp. Yes: hatchets, axes, chain saws and sawmills.

Yet it's a simple clobbering with cast-iron pan that really starts the damage report in "Last Night in Twisted River."

Mutilations will come later, after the naked Lady Sky parachutes into the pigpen.

The story begins with a 12-year-old boy, Danny, mistaking the zaftig Indian woman atop his widower father for a bear, owing to her bulk and body-draping canopy of hair and the fact that they're making the beast with two backs. He swings the killer skillet, fetching Injun Jane a mortal blow upside her head. It's part of the "world of accidents" that the father, Dominic, sees around him.

Because Jane was the mistress of Constable Carl, a vicious, vengeful drunk with a Colt .45, Dominic and Danny flee to Boston. There they find the mother of a runaway who drowned at the logging camp just before they fled. Dominic works as a restaurant cook and moves in with the mother. Periodic bulletins about Carl come from their friend Ketchum, a rough-hewed logger in New Hampshire.

The story follows father and son as they move several times to avoid the constable and as the boy grows up to become a novelist. His career and books and their Odyssey match up with Irving's career on several points, such as a stint at the Iowa Writers' Workshop with Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and novels that deal with the Vietnam War or abortion.

Of course, there's a bear and a flatulent dog — even an allusion to Garp's Under Toad: "There was always something or someone in a Danny Angel novel that was ominously threatening to children, or to a child."

Through all this, Irving weaves the effects of an earlier triangle, formed and accepted by Ketchum, Dominic and the latter's wife. Her accidental death helped forge a lifelong bond between the men that Danny comes to share — another triangle.

From its logging-camp roots through the vendetta and this rich friendship, "Last Night in Twisted River" is a very male book, focused on sons, fathers and surrogates. Women tend to appear on stage briefly, lingering only in memory. An exception is Ketchum's long, though largely offstage affair with Six-Pack Pam, a tough backwoods woman who plays key minor roles.

Irving seems to enjoy charting his growth as a novelist through Danny, and eventually lets the writer take over completely. In the closing pages, Danny is working out the opening sentences of this novel.

With his narrative fits and starts, well-worn themes and repetitiousness, Irving can seem to be almost a graceless writer.

Yet while "Last Night" has those potential flaws — I say potential because the same characteristics are an accepted part of oral narration — it's tightly plotted overall, suspenseful and ultimately evocative.

I should mention that the novel has one typically bloody Irving threat, besides the vendetta, hanging over much of the story, in case any fan felt shortchanged back at the logging camp. About Lady Sky, though, I'll leave you in suspense.