A tragic-comic classic from one of the world’s greatest living writers.
Jack Burns' mother, Alice, is a tattoo artist in search of the boy's father, William, a virtuoso organist, who has fled America to Europe. To fund her journey, she plies her trade in the seaports of the North Sea as she tracks her four-year-old son's errant father. But Alice is a mystery, and William can't be found. And even Jack's memories are subject to doubt.
Jack returns to the United States, and studies in Canada and New England, but his life is still shaped by the events of his childhood quest, in particular his relationships with older women. It is only when he becomes a Hollywood actor that what he has experienced in the past comes into telling play in his present...
Reading Group Book Questions
- Jack Burns’s most vivid childhood memory is the moment of reaching for his mother’s hand. Why is this feeling so significant for Jack? Is there a similarly powerful memory from your own childhood that you can recall? Why has it stayed with you?
- The trip to the North Sea with his mother had formed Jack Burns.’ In what ways had the search for his father – which took Jack and Alice from Copenhagen’s tattoo parlors to Amsterdam’s red light district – shaped Jack’s character? Also, discuss how Jack’s perception of the odyssey changes over the course of the novel. If this trip ‘formed’ him, how does the ‘revision’ of the trip later in the nove
- Describe Jack’s mother, Alice Stronach, and discuss her heartache and human failings. Did you feel sympathy for her? Anger? Both? In her own way, was Alice ever a good mother to Jack? Do you think she would have been a different mother, or woman, had William Burns chosen to stay with her?
- As a reader, you also may have felt subject to Alice’s deceptions; are you willing to forgive her? Is Jack?
About The Author
John Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times, winning it in 1980 for The World According to Garp. In 1992, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules - a film with seven Academy Award nominations. Last Night in Twisted River is his twelfth novel.
Industry Reviews
John Irving has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut and J.D. Salinger, but is arguably more inventive than either. Wry, laconic, he sketches his characters with an economy that springs from a feeling for words and a mastery of his craft * The Times *
Irving writes with a lapidary directness that is unsurpassed by any living writer * Sunday Telegraph *
It is very satisfying to read a book that is hard to put down, and if this were a more valued criterion, Irving would no doubt by now have received the official accolades he deserves * Financial Times *
Vivid, eccentric, memorable * Independent *
Irving's popularity is not too difficult to understand. His world really is the world according to everyone * Time *
