Last Night In Twisted River

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“All writers are outsiders,” Da

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In the media, real life was more important than fiction; those elements of a novel that were, at least, based on personal experience were of more interest to the general public than those pieces of the novel-writing process that were “merely” made up. In any work of fiction, weren’t those things that had really happened to the writer-or, perhaps, to someone the writer had intimately known-more authentic, more verifiably true, than anything that anyone could imagine? (This was a common belief, even though a fiction writer’s job was imagining, truly, a whole story-as Da

Yet who was the audience for Da

Once again, what did Da

It was Joe’s senior year in Boulder; he had just turned twenty-two. The irony was that Baby in the Road had always been about the death of a beloved only child. But in the novel Da

Naturally, the novel would change. After the death of his son, Da

What wouldn’t Da

When, after that year had passed, Da

Not surprisingly, the theme of the novel didn’t change. How could it? Da

BABY IN THE ROAD was first published in 1995, eleven years after the publication of East of Bangor and eight years after Joe had died. In the revised version, the former two-year-old grows up to be a risk-taking young man; he dies at Joe’s age, twenty-two, when he’s still a college student. The death is ruled an accident, though it might have been a suicide. Unlike Joe, the character in Da

In truth, by the time he was a senior in college, Joe seemed to have outgrown his recklessness. His drinking-what little he did of it-was in control. He skied fast, but he’d had no injuries. He appeared to be a good driver; for four years, he drove a car in Colorado and didn’t get a single speeding ticket. He’d even slowed down with the girls a little-or so it had seemed to his grandfather and his dad. Of course the cook and his son had never stopped worrying about the boy; throughout his college years, however, Joe had honestly given them little cause to be concerned. Even his grades had been good-better than they’d been at Northfield Mount Hermon. (Like many kids who’d gone away from home to an independent boarding school, Joe always claimed that college was easier.)