Last Night In Twisted River

The cook knew his son’s worst fears: Daniel was absolutely terrified of something happening to his loved ones; he simply obsessed about that subject. That was where the writer’s fearful imagination came from-childhood terrors. The writer Da

IN HIS QUIET KITCHEN, in his cherished Avellino, the cook prayed that he be allowed to live a little longer; he wanted to help his grandson survive being a teenager. Maybe boys aren’t out of the woods until their late twenties, Tony considered-after all, Daniel had been twenty-two when he married Katie. (Certainly that had been taking a risk!) What if Joe had to be thirty before he was safe? And if anything did happen to Joe, the cook prayed he would still be alive to look after Daniel; he knew how much help his son would need then.

Tony Angel looked at the silent radio; he almost turned it on, just to help him banish these morbid thoughts. He considered writing a letter to Ketchum instead of turning on the radio, but he didn’t do either of these things; he just kept praying. It seemed that the praying had come to him out of nowhere, and he wished he could stop doing it.

There in his kitchen, next to his cookbooks, were various editions of Da

After Family Life in Coos County, the cook knew that Daniel had published The Mickey, but was that in 1972 or ’73? The first novel had been dedicated to Mr. Leary, but the second one should have been, given its subject matter. As he’d more or less promised, however, Da

“Isn’t that sort of like letting the nom-de-plume cat out of the nom-de-plume bag?” Ketchum had complained, but it had turned out for the better. When Da

Da

A secondary but major character in The Mickey is a repressed Irishman who teaches English at the Michelangelo School; the novel focuses on the main character’s last encounter with his former English teacher at a striptease show in the Old Howard. To the cook, it seemed a slight coincidence to build a whole book around-the mutual shame and embarrassment of the former student (now an Exeter boy, with a bunch of his Exeter friends) and the character who was clearly modeled on Mr. Leary. Probably, the episode at the Old Howard had actually happened-or so the novelist’s father believed.

The third novel came along in ’75, just after they’d all moved back to Vermont from Iowa. The cook would wonder if his was the only family to have mistakenly assumed that “kissing cousins” meant cousins who were sexually interested in, or involved with, one another. Da

The cook was relieved that his son’s third book wasn’t dedicated to Da

The novel might have been pure fantasy, or wishful thinking, the cook supposed. But there were details that particularly bothered the writer’s dad-for example, how the older cousin breaks off the relationship with the young boy when he’s going off to boarding school. The waitress tells the kid that all along, she wanted to be fucking the boy’s father-not the boy. (Little is written about the character of the dad; he’s rather distantly described as the “new cook” in the restaurant where his son is a busboy.) The rejected boy goes off to school hating his father, because he imagines that the older cousin will eventually seduce his dad.

Surely this couldn’t be true-this was outrageous! Tony Angel was thinking, as he searched in the book for that passage where the train is pulling out of North Station, and the boy is looking out the window of the train at his father on the station platform. The boy suddenly can’t bear to look at his dad; his attention shifts to his stepmother. “I knew that the next time I saw her she would probably have put on a few more pounds,” Da

“How could you write that about Carmella?” the cook had yelled at his writer son when he’d first read that hurtful sentence.

“It’s not Carmella, Dad,” Daniel said. (Okay-maybe the character of the stepmother in Kissing Kin wasn’t Carmella, but Da

“I suppose it’s just tough luck being in a writer’s family,” Ketchum had told the cook. “I mean, we get mad if Da

All that was true, the cook thought. Somehow what struck him about Daniel’s fiction was that it was both autobiographical and not autobiographical at the same time. (Da

The cook couldn’t find the passage he was searching for in Kissing Kin. He put his son’s third novel back on the bookshelf, his eyes passing quickly over the fourth one-“the fame-maker,” Ketchum called it. Tony Angel didn’t even like to look at The Ke