Coming to a theater near you in August, the film version of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love (will renew interest in this 2006 bestseller, now available in a new movie tie-in edition. The adventure-filled memoir chronicles Gilbert’s 12-month solo journey—a trip she takes in the wake of a painful divorce, hoping to regain her inner equilibrium. Over the course of her travels, she makes some surprising discoveries about herself and what she wants from life. Italy with its rich cuisine re- awakens her sense of pleasure, while India provides much-needed spiritual solace. Gilbert consults shamans, yogis and other wise figures in hopes of connecting with the divine. In an unexpected turn of events that’s sure to make the reader cheer, she finally finds her Prince Charming. A companionable narrator with a shrewd eye for de- tail, Gilbert infuses the travelogue form with new spirit.

ON THE RUN

Spanning five decades, John Irving’s majestic novel, Last Night in Twisted River, provides ample evidence of the author’s enduring narrative gifts. The year is 1954, and widower Dominic Baciagalupo is working as a cook at a New Hampshire logging settle- ment called Twisted River, where he lives with his son Danny. When a tragedy at the camp turns father and son into outlaws, they leave their old lives behind and begin an itinerant existence, wandering through New England and up into Canada. Along the way, Danny passes through various schools, and Dominic makes ends meet as a chef. All the while, they’re pursued by an unstoppable constable from Twisted River who’s convinced they’re responsible for a death at the camp. Detailed and expansive, Irving’s 12th novel covers plenty of ground, chronicling Danny’s eventual career as a writer and the birth of his son, Joe. The book’s resolution is trademark Irving—unexpected, moving and provocative. Broad in conception, compellingly plotted, this is an unforgettable work from a master storyteller.

TOP PICK

In Her Fearful Symmetry, a follow-up to the bestseller The Time- Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger offers a contemporary ghost story that’s sure to satisfy her many fans. Elspeth Noblin has died from can- cer, leaving her London flat to the twin daughters of her twin sister. Raised in the Chicago suburbs, the two girls, Julia and Valentina, are 20 years old and very close. They never knew their aunt, but they take over her flat—which is located near London’s Highgate Cemetery—with enthusiasm. The girls soon befriend Elspeth’s old neighbors, including Robert, her former boyfriend, and Martin, who suffers from obsessive- compulsive disorder. Hovering over the scene is the ghost of Elspeth herself, who can’t seem to quit her old life. When Julia becomes jealous of her sister’s new relationship with Robert, Elspeth’s ghost intervenes. Niffenegger writes with persuasiveness and originality about matters of the heart and matters of the afterlife. Her poetic prose adds an extra, delightful layer to this imaginative tale. 

Copyright 2010 BookPage Reviews.

While the end of summer marks the conclusion of the beach-reading season, publishers are saving some of the year's biggest books for the cooler months. From the return of Robert Langdon and another novel from Nicholas Sparks to the newest novels from literary powerhouses like Audrey Niffenegger, Margaret Atwood and John Irving, this fall is shaping up to be the season of the next big book.

Dan Brown is back

When Dan Brown's publishers announced the title and on-sale date of the long-awaited sequel to The Da Vinci Code this spring, fans went absolutely wild. You couldn't check an online bookseller without being cheerfully encouraged to "Pre-Order Your Copy Today!" And for good reason. To be released on September 15 with a first printing of five million copies, The Lost Symbol is the follow-up to Brown's record-breaking international bestseller. The new book will once again feature symbologist hero Robert Langdon, this time in a thriller that revolves around the Freemasons, an organization that Brown has called the "oldest fraternity in history." The book jacket features the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., lit up against the background of a large red wax seal. Embedded in the wax is an unidentifiable symbol. There have long been theories tying the Freemasons to our nation's capital—including speculation that the streets of Washington, D.C. were planned to physically mirror important Masonic symbols. Does the jacket offer clues to the plot? "Nothing ever is as it first appears in a Dan Brown novel," says Jason Kaufman, Brown's longtime editor at Doubleday. "This book's narrative takes place in a 12-hour period, and from the first page, Dan's readers will feel the thrill of discovery as they follow Robert Langdon through a masterful and unexpected new landscape. The Lost Symbol is full of surprises." Since the books will no doubt be under lockand- key until the on-sale date, all we can do is wait and wonder. And pre-order, of course.

Familial love and loss

Considered the reigning champ of the contemporary family drama/love story genre, Nicholas Sparks seems to churn out a new bestseller every year. After last year's The Lucky One, Sparks is back this month with The Last Song. In this, Sparks' 15th novel, we meet troubled teen Veronica "Ronnie" Miller as her world is falling apart. Still heartbroken and angry about her parents' divorce three years earlier, Ronnie is furious when her mother decides she should leave their home in New York City and join her now-reclusive father for the summer in Wilmington, North Carolina. Readers who dive into Sparks' soon-to-be bestseller should count on equal doses of raw emotion, young love, family angst and— ultimately—sweet resolution. A movie version is due in early 2010, and sources say Sparks wrote the novel (and co-wrote the screenplay) with teen queen star Miley Cyrus in mind.

More from The Time Traveler

Six years (and a reported $5 million advance) after her debut smash The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger is back with the September 29 release of Her Fearful Symmetry. The story begins as Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer in London. She has long been estranged from her twin sister, Edie, but nevertheless leaves her London flat to Edie's twin daughters—Julia and Valentina—who never knew their Aunt Elspeth. Twenty-year-old Julia and Valentina have lived in America their whole lives, and they are intrigued by their aunt's generosity and a chance at an exciting new life in London. But their inheritance has specific conditions: the twins must live in Elspeth's apartment together, and they must stay for at least one year; even stranger, Edie and her husband Jack are forbidden to set foot in the flat. The twins will have another roommate in their new London home—the ghost of Aunt Elspeth. While early reviews have not been entirely favorable, readers will have to make up their own minds about this much-hyped spooky story.

Apocalypse now

Another big-name author to return to bookstores in September is the brilliant and inventive Margaret Atwood. Her first full-length novel since 2003's Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood is being hailed as another "dystopic masterpiece." Of returning to the desolate landscape she mined in Oryx, Atwood explains: "In the three years that passed before I began writing The Year of the Flood, the perceived gap between that supposedly unreal future and the harsh one we might very well live through was narrowing fast. What is happening to our world? What can we do to reverse the damage? How long have we got?" Looks like we're in for another fascinating—and important—literary treat from the incomparable Atwood.

From father to son

Many John Irving fans were unsure what to make of the author's last offering, 2005's Until I Find You. Supposedly his most personal work to date, the novel received mixed reviews and didn't come close to hitting the sales marks of Irving's beloved bestsellers. But early readers are buzzing about his October 27 release, Last Night in Twisted River, a dark father/son story and Irving's 12th novel. In 1954, in a small New Hampshire town, a nervous 12-year-old boy mistakes the local sheriff 's girlfriend for a wild animal. Tragedy follows, and the boy and his father start a life on the run, traveling from Coos County, New Hampshire to Boston, Vermont, Toronto and back again. At nearly 600 pages, Last Night is being compared to Irving classics like The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany. But as with all pre-publication hype, the proof will be in the literary pudding.

John Irving did not actually attend his induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma, some 15 years ago. But now he wishes he had. "I regret it," Irving admits during a call to his hotel room in San Francisco, where he has come to dine with Bay Area booksellers prior to the publication of his exuberantly inventive 12th novel, Last Night in Twisted River. "There have always been these two parts of my life, and they don't overlap very easily. My wrestling friends are not very easily mixed with my writing friends, and vice versa. But it's an honor that meant a great deal to me because that sport was such a huge part of my life," says Irving, who competed in wrestling in high school and college.

Writing and wrestling may not mix in Irving's real life, but the tension between the two worlds—the intensely physical world of wrestling and the inward, reflective world of a writer's imagination—has been a powerful source of that exciting blend of comedy and tragedy that is one of the hallmarks of his best fiction. Irving's breakthrough novel, The World According to Garp, is a case in point. So, in a way, is his newest novel.

Last Night in Twisted River takes place first in the physically dangerous, working-class world of New England logging camps, and then, a bit later, in the physically exhausting kitchens of the Italian restaurants of Boston's North End. These places comprise a world that somewhat unexpectedly produces a young novelist whose later career bears remarkable similarities to Irving's own.

This new novel, whose pages contain some of the most entertaining and intellectually playful storytelling of Irving's career, opens in 1954 in a logging camp in northern New Hampshire during one of the last river drives, just as logging roads and logging trucks are beginning to supplant river transport as a way of moving logs out of the forest to downstream lumber mills. Dominic Baciagalupo ("Cookie"), the camp cook, and his 12-year-old son Danny, the future novelist, are in a sort of emotional holding pattern after the drowning death of Dominic's wife (and the boy's mother).

Then through one of those tragicomic accidents so typical of Irving's fiction, father and son become fugitives from a relentless deputy sheriff and spend the next 50 years in hiding, often in plain sight. During their time on the run, they change identities—the father goes from cook to chef and the son raises a family and becomes a best-selling writer.

"One of the things I like about the structure of the fugitive story," Irving says, "is that from the violence that begins part one, you know what is going to happen. There's going to be a shootout. It's inevitable. It's just a question of how and when. I like how that satisfies something I've always liked to do with readers, which is to allow readers to anticipate where the story is going—almost. I want the reader to say, ‘Oh, I know what is going to happen. I see this coming.' But they don't quite see everything."

Among the many items that readers familiar with Irving's previous novels will anticipate, but not necessarily accurately predict, are the electric profusion of subplots and plot twists; the large and idiosyncratic cast of characters; and the bravura demonstrations of audacious storytelling skill in chapters like "In Media Res," wherein Irving offers a dizzying and delightful example of jumping right into the middle of his story and telling it from both ends and the middle.

That particular chapter, Irving advises, "is a labyrinth. You have to walk your way very slowly through it. . . . Like the novels I most like to read, this is one in which you know you've got to pay attention."

A careful reading of Last Night in Twisted River turns out to be richly rewarding, for this multilayered novel is, in part, an emotionally resonant exploration of 50 years of American life and, in a way, of Irving's own life as a writer.

"I like the part of this novel that is about a writer's process," Irving says. "I've written about it before, but I feel I've never written about it as well or as comprehensively. I think I've woven the reasons for Danny becoming the kind of writer he is into the story of what happens to him."

And what about the fact that Danny's career and attitudes—including his objection to readers who think his fictional works are merely veiled autobiography—resemble Irving's own?

"I'm having fun with that," Irving says. "Like Danny, I went through years and years of being asked if I was writing autobiographical fiction, the assumption being that I was. But I wasn't. My earliest novels were entirely made up. My later novels have become more autobiographical. I'm a very slow processor, and those things that had an impact on me when I was a child or an adolescent, I did not write about when I was in my 20s, my 30s or my 40s. But I have written more about my childhood and adolescence lately—over the age of 60. One reason for that is if you let enough time pass, your memory is no longer the tyrant it once was. You can afford to be playful and take liberties and invent better stuff."

Irving pauses and adds, "When you repeatedly write about things that have never happened to you, but which you hope don't, when you write about things you fear, you are also being, at least psychologically, autobiographical. In how many of my novels is a child lost? But I have never lost one, thank God. I have three children and I think about it every day—as any parent with an imagination does. You think that isn't autobiographical? Of course it is. What is thought to be autobiographical in fiction is so narrowly defined and is often trivial. Whereas the things that truly obsess a writer, that a writer even unconsciously goes back to again and again, those things are real and they are autobiographical—whether they happened or not."

So, call Last Night in Twisted River part 12 in the psychological autobiography of one-time wrestler John Irving, if you like. Better yet, call it a darn good novel and a delight to read.

Alden Mudge writes from San Francisco.

RELATED CONTENT

Our coverage of John Irving

Copyright 2009 BookPage Reviews.

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 cliché) 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

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.)