Dark side of paternal instinct

 Last Night in Twisted River By John Irving Bloomsbury, 554pp, $55

WHEN G.K. Chesterton, in an attempt to capture something of the largesse of Charles Dickens's fictional universe, called him an author of riotous realism, he could just as well have been describing John Irving.

In the four decades since his first novel, the American has created fictions that teem with 19th-century colour. Irving's bulked-up plots shamelessly plunder the stock Victorian genres of melodrama and ghost story, and his characters display the sort of Dickensian flamboyance that renders them more heroic, grotesque or absurd than their more soberly proportioned literary peers.

The great advantage of such imaginative supersizing is that it speaks to a larger readership; indeed, Irving is one of a dwindling band of authors who can claim literary and popular audiences for his work. But the flaw in Irving's method emerges from the same manic source as his success. Last Night in Twisted River proves how narrow the line dividing narrative sprawl from narrative chaos, characterful exaggeration from outright caricature.

Irving's 12th novel opens in the working forests of northern New Hampshire in 1954. A young man named Angel drowns in an attempt to free up river-jammed logs, a sudden and violent death that prefigures many more through the next 500 pages. The young Italian-American had been working in the logging-camps kitchen, where he came under the protection of its chef, Dominic Baciagalupo, and his 12-year-old son, Daniel, as well as their constant companion, a rough-hewn logger named Ketchum.

This tragedy has a particular resonance for these three, since Dominic's wife, Rosie - Daniel's mother and, we later learn, Ketchum's lover - also drowned in the river, falling through the ice during late-night carousing years before. These days, Dominic is having an affair with Injun Jane, girlfriend of Twisted River's constable, Carl, a violent drunk who is suspicious of hanky-panky between them.

When young Daniel mistakes the magnificently coiffed Jane for a bear trying to eat his father (they're actually having sex) and kills her with a cast-iron skillet, father and son decide to plant her body at the home of the comatose sheriff in the hope that Carl will be drunk enough to believe himself responsible for Jane's death and leave town for good. The rest of the novel takes place under the shadow of these events.

So far, so Irving: the New Hampshire setting, evoked in loving and masterful detail; the cast of misfits and malcontents, marked by deformity (the cook, for example, lamed by a logging accident) or grown whole from some isolated physical attribute (Ketchum's great bulk, Injun Jane's floor-length hair); the unconventional constellations of marriage and family; the air of gentle courtliness, interrupted by gratuitous instances of sex or violence; and, of course, the bears, totemic animals since his 1968 debut.

This time, though, Irving's characteristic manipulation of narrative time, in which crucial events or pieces of information are tantalisingly withheld, then later disclosed with a showman's flourish, works to dispel rather than build readers' engagement. Dominic and Daniel's flight takes them to Boston's little Italy in the 1960s, while the height of the Vietnam conflict finds Daniel enrolled at Iowa's famed creative-writing program.

Later still, father and his by-now famous writer son are obliged to move yet again, from rural Vermont to the liberal safe-haven of Toronto, where September 11 and the Bush years are viewed from a safe yet furious remove. The novel concludes, 50 years after its start, in the frozen islands of Lake Ontario.

The epic scale of Twisted River should allow Irving plenty of room to situate Carl's lifelong vendetta against the Baciagalupos within the larger violence of those decades. Instead, the expansiveness works to neutralise plot. The reader is shunted forward to each new locale and decade like the bewildered occupant of a time machine on autopilot. By the time Irving has circled back to explain the death of a child or the loss of a lover, or some other shattering event in Ketchum and the Baciagalupos's sad and death-haunted lives, so much time has elapsed that we are numb to the tragedy.

This low-grade entropy also affects the development of character, usually Irving's strongest suit. Dominic is often described as melancholy, Ketchum as irascible, but the frequency with which the author insists on these character traits suggests the creator is not himself quite sure. Daniel, as befits the future author of the novel we hold in our hands, is a more tangible figure, yet, he, too, seems oddly passive, abdicating his own daily existence in favour of invented worlds.

What Irving is attempting here is enormously ambitious: a panoptic of postwar American society, splendid in all its multifariousness and miserable in its slow decline, that simultaneously serves as an affirmation of the virtues of fiction in the face of overwhelming world-historical fact.

But he is similarly insistent that the book should be a valedictory lap of the landscapes, cities, milieus and types he has already summoned into being in previous books. By the time Carl finally tracks down father and son, so much history has interposed itself between past and present, and so many echoes of previous works have sounded, that the reader has long forgotten the impulse that has brought him to their door.

Irving has every right to revisit New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa: these are the compass points of an America that Irving owns, having so brilliantly transposed them on to his own fictional map.

But even Dickens was unable to replicate the original energy of his great creations; unforgettable Fagin eventually became the dreary Riah of Our Mutual Friend. By hearkening back to his grandest moments, Twisted River draws attention to the poverty of its present. Not only is his narrative of fathers and sons spread too thin across the latter years of the American century, his once-vivid cast has succumbed to glumness or, worse still, a cartoonish case of the grumps.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.