John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Once again, what did Danny expect? Hadn’t he begged the question? Just look at his last book, Baby in the Road; what did Danny think the media would make of it? He had begun that book, his seventh novel, before he’d left Vermont. Danny was almost finished with the manuscript in March ’87. It was late March of that year when Joe died. In Colorado, it was not yet mud season. (“Shit, it was almost mud season,” Ketchum would say.)

It was Joe’s senior year in Boulder; he had just turned twenty-two. The irony was that Baby in the Road had always been about the death of a beloved only child. But in the novel Danny had almost finished, the child dies when he’s still in diapers-a two-year-old, run over in the road, much as what might have happened to little Joe that day on Iowa Avenue. The unfinished novel was about how the death of that child destroys what the cook and Ketchum would no doubt have described as the Danny character and the Katie character, who go their separate but doomed ways.

Naturally, the novel would change. After the death of his son, Danny Angel didn’t write for more than a year. It was not the writing that was hard, as Danny said to his friend Armando DeSimone; it was the imagining . Whenever Danny tried to imagine anything, all he could see was how Joe had died; what the writer also endlessly imagined were the small details that might have been subject to change, those infinitesimal details that could have kept his son alive. (If Joe had only done this, not that… if the cook and his son had not been in Toronto at that time… if Danny had bought or rented a house in Boulder, instead of Winter Park… if Joe had not learned to ski… if, as Ketchum had advised, they’d never lived in Vermont… if an avalanche had closed the road over Berthoud Pass… if Joe had been too drunk to drive, instead of being completely sober… if the passenger had been another boy, not that girl… if Danny hadn’t been in love…) Well, was there anything a writer couldn’t imagine?

What wouldn’t Danny have thought of, if only to torture himself? Danny couldn’t bring Joe back to life; he couldn’t change what had happened to his son, the way a fiction writer could revise a novel.

When, after that year had passed, Danny Angel could finally bear to reread what he’d written in Baby in the Road , the accidental killing of that two-year-old in diapers, which once began the book, not to mention the subsequent tormenting of the dead toddler’s parents, seemed almost inconsequential. Wasn’t it worse to have a child escape death that first time, and grow up-only to die later, a young man in his prime? And to make the story worse in that way, in a novel-to make what happens more heartbreaking, in other words-well, wasn’t that actually a better story? Doubtless, Danny believed so. He’d rewritten Baby in the Road from start to finish. This had taken another five, almost six years.

Not surprisingly, the theme of the novel didn’t change. How could it? Danny had discovered that the devastation of losing a child stayed very much the same; it mattered little that the details were different.

BABY IN THE ROAD was first published in 1995 , eleven years after the publication of East of Bangor and eight years after Joe had died. In the revised version, the former two-year-old grows up to be a risk-taking young man; he dies at Joe’s age, twenty-two, when he’s still a college student. The death is ruled an accident, though it might have been a suicide. Unlike Joe, the character in Danny’s seventh novel is drunk at the time of his death; he has also swallowed a shitload of barbiturates. He inhales a ham sandwich and chokes to death on his own vomit.

In truth, by the time he was a senior in college, Joe seemed to have outgrown his recklessness. His drinking-what little he did of it-was in control. He skied fast, but he’d had no injuries. He appeared to be a good driver; for four years, he drove a car in Colorado and didn’t get a single speeding ticket. He’d even slowed down with the girls a little-or so it had seemed to his grandfather and his dad. Of course the cook and his son had never stopped worrying about the boy; throughout his college years, however, Joe had honestly given them little cause to be concerned. Even his grades had been good-better than they’d been at Northfield Mount Hermon. (Like many kids who’d gone away from home to an independent boarding school, Joe always claimed that college was easier.)

As a novelist, Danny Angel had taken pains to make the arguably suicidal character in Baby in the Road as unlike Joe as possible. The young man in the book is a sensitive, artistic type. He’s in delicate health-from the beginning, he seems fated to die-and he’s no athlete. The novel is set in Vermont, not in Colorado. Revised, the boy’s wayward mother isn’t wayward enough to be a Katie character, although, like her doomed son, she has a drinking problem. In the rewrite, the Danny character, the boy’s grieving father, doesn’t give up drinking, but he’s not an alcoholic. (He is never compromised or incapacitated by what he drinks; he’s just depressed.)

In the first few years after Joe died, the cook would occasionally try to talk his son out of drinking again. “You’ll feel better if you don’t, Daniel. In the long run, you’ll wish you hadn’t gone back to it.”

“It’s for research, Pop,” Danny would tell his dad, but that answer no longer applied-not after he’d rewritten Baby in the Road , and the book had been finished for more than five years. In the new novel that Danny was writing, the main characters weren’t drinkers; Danny’s drinking wasn’t for “research”-not that it ever was.

But the cook could see that Danny didn’t drink to excess. He had a couple of beers before dinner-he’d always liked the taste of beer-and not more than a glass or two of red wine with his meal. (Without the wine, he didn’t sleep.) It was clear that Dominic’s beloved Daniel hadn’t gone back to being the kind of drinker he used to be.

Dominic could also see for himself that his son’s sadness had endured. After Joe’s death, Ketchum observed that Danny’s sadness had a look of permanence about it. Even interviewers, or anyone meeting the author for the first time, noticed it. Not surprisingly, in many of the interviews Danny had done for various publications of Baby in the Road , the questions about the novel’s main subject-the death of a child-had been personal. In every novel, there are parts that hit uncomfortably close to home for the novelist; obviously, these are areas of emotional history that the writer would prefer not to talk about.

Wasn’t it enough that Danny had made every effort to detach himself from the personal? He’d enhanced, he’d exaggerated, he’d stretched the story to the limits of believability-he’d made the most awful things happen to characters he had imagined as completely as possible. (“So-called real people are never as complete as wholly imagined characters,” the novelist had repeatedly said.) Yet Danny Angel’s interviewers had asked him almost nothing about the story and the characters in Baby in the Road; instead they’d asked Danny how he was “dealing with” the death of his son. Had the writer’s “real-life tragedy” made him reconsider the importance of fiction-meaning the weight, the gravity, the relative value of the “merely” make-believe?

That kind of question drove Danny Angel crazy, but he expected too much from journalists; most of them lacked the imagination to believe that anything credible in a novel had been “wholly imagined.” And those former journalists who later turned to writing fiction subscribed to that tiresome Hemingway dictum of writing about what you know. What bullshit was this? Novels should be about the people you know? How many boring but deadeningly realistic novels can be attributed to this lame and utterly uninspired advice?