Projo Arts Blog

Fleeing the imbroglio, the cook hides young son Danny in Boston and raises him with the help of the restaurant staff. Danny grows up to become a writer who falls in love with a wild girl of the '60s and heads for the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Out there in the Midwest, Danny's marriage falls apart, but he's left with his own young son and the wonderful memory of a voluptuous skydiver who once dropped into a birthday party at a pig farm, promising Danny's toddler son she'd always be there to protect him; would they ever see her again?

Danny's fame grows but he and his son follow the cook to different restaurant jobs, moving when they fear the vengeful ex from long ago is getting too close on their trail. Always, the cook's best buddy, a cantankerous woodsman called Ketchum, sends faxes of complaint about the world and shows up unexpectedly to make sure the boys are all okay.

In some ways, this is a roman a clef. The canon Danny creates has vaguely Irvingesque qualities -- there are references to his "abortion novel," for example. And his mentor at Iowa is Kurt Vonnegut, Irving's teacher there as well. Danny dismisses readers' attempts to see his biography in his stories, and so must we. But the game is still fun -- and Irving knows this.

It's the long, winding plot that lures us in. And the confident voice of a master storyteller. Irving meanders through the woods and villages of New Hampshire and Vermont; he takes us through the streets of Boston and the farms of Iowa. But each chapter rises toward a sense of inevitability -- some love or loss, a near-miss or fresh response to the next unpredictable accident. And, in the background, American history unfolds -- the lumber camps die, the Vietnam War comes and goes, 9/11 shocks again.

As Irving's narrator says: "We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly -- as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth -- the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives."

Beth Taylor teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program in Brown's English Department and is the author of "The Plain Language of Love and Loss: A Quaker Memoir."