Last Night in Twisted River

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.

Surel

y 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," Danny Angel wrote.

"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 Danny Angel dedicated the novel to her.)

"I suppose it's just tough luck being in a writer's family," Ketchum had told the cook. "I mean, we get mad if Danny writes about us, or someone we know, but we also get mad at him for not writing about us, or for not really writing about himself--his true self, I mean. Not to mention that he made his damn ex-wife a better person than she ever was!"

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. (Danny disagreed, of course. After his schoolboy attempts at fiction writing, which he'd shown only to Mr. Leary--and those stories were nothing but a confusing mix of memoir and fantasy, both exaggerated, and nearly as "confusing" to Danny as they were to the late Michael Leary--the young novelist had not really been autobiographical at all, not in his opinion.)

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 Kennedy Fathers--the one with the fake Katie in it, as he thought of it. The novel had not only made his son famous; it was an international bestseller and the first one of Daniel's books to be made into a movie.

Almost everyone said that it wasn't a bad movie, though it was not nearly as successful as the novel. Danny didn't like the film, but he said he didn't hate it, either; he just wanted nothing to do with the moviemaking process. He said that he never wanted to write a screenplay, and that he wouldn't sell the film rights to any of his other novels--unless someone wrote a halfway decent adaptation first, and Danny got to read the screenplay before he sold the movie rights to the novel.

The writer had explained to his dad that this was not the way the movie business worked; generally speaking, the rights to make a film from a novel were sold before a screenwriter was even attached to the project. By demanding to see a finished screenplay before he would consider selling the rights to his novel, Danny Angel was pretty much assuring himself that no one would ever make another movie of one of his books--not while he was alive, anyway.

"I guess Danny did hate the movie of The Kennedy Fathers, after all," Ketchum had said to the cook.

But the logger and the author's dad had to be careful what they said about The Kennedy Fathers around young Joe. Danny had dedicated the novel to his son. Ketchum and the cook were at least pleased to see that the book wasn't dedicated to Katie. Naturally, Danny was aware that the two old friends weren't exactly fans of his famous fourth novel.

It was only natural, one of Daniel's publishers had told the cook--she was one of the foreign ones, one of the older women the writer had slept with--that whatever novel Danny Angel wrote after The Kennedy Fathers was going to get criticized for not living up to the breakthrough book and runaway bestseller that the famous fourth novel was. Even so, Danny didn't help himself by writing a fifth novel that was both dense and sexually disturbing. And, as more than one critic wrote, the writer loved semicolons to excess; he'd even put one in the title!

It was simply stupid, that title--The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt, Daniel had called it. "Constipated Christ!" Ketchum had shouted at the bestselling author. "Couldn't you have called it one thing or the other?"

In interviews, Danny always said that the title reflected the old-fashioned nineteenth-century kind of story that the novel was. "Bullshit," the cook had said to his son. "That title makes you look like you can't make up your mind."

"Whatever you call them, they look like someone smashed a fly over the comma," Ketchum said to Danny, about all the semicolons. "The only writing I do are letters to you and your dad, but I've written rather a lot of them, and in all those letters, I don't believe I've ever used as many of those damn things as you use on any one fucking page of this novel."

"They're called semicolons, Ketchum," the writer said.

"I don't care what they're called, Danny," the old woodsman said. "I'm just telling you that you use too damn many of them!"

But of course what really pissed off Ketchum and the cook about Danny Angel's fifth novel was the fucking dedication--"Katie, in memoriam."

All Tony Angel could say about it to Ketchum was: "That Callahan cunt broke my son's heart and abandoned my grandson." (It was not a good time, Ketchum knew, to point out to his old friend that she'd also kept his son out of the war and had given him the grandson.)

Not to mention what The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt was about, the cook was thinking, as he looked with suspicion at the novel on his kitchen bookshelf. It's another North End story, but this time the boy who is coming of age is sexually initiated by one of his aunts--not an older cousin--and the maiden aunt and spinster is a dead ringer for Rosie's youngest sister, the unfortunate Filomena Calogero!

Surely this hadn't happened! the cook hoped, but had Daniel once wished that it had--or had it almost happened? Once again (as in any Danny Angel novel) the graphic detail was quite convincing, and the sexual descriptions of the boy's petite aunt--she was such a pathetic, self-pitying woman!--were painful for the cook, though he'd read every word.

Critics also made the point that "the perhaps overrated writer" was "repeating himself;" Daniel had been thirty-nine when his fifth novel was published in 1981, and all the criticism must have stung him, though you wouldn't know it. If the cousin in Kissing Kin tells the boy she's breaking up with that she always wanted to sleep with his father instead, in the novel about the neurotic aunt, she tells the boy that she imagines she's having sex with his father whenever she has sex with the son! (What manifestation of self-torture is this? the cook had wondered, when he'd first read The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt.)

Maybe it did happen, the man who missed the Dominic in himself now imagined. He'd always thought that Rosie's sister Filomena was completely crazy. He couldn't look at her without feeling she was a grotesque mask of Rosie--"a Rosie imposter," he'd once described her to Ketchum. But Daniel had seemed improbably infatuated with Filomena; the boy couldn't stop himself from staring at her, and it was not as an aunt that he appeared to be regarding her. Had the flighty Filomena, who was still miserable and unmarried (or so the cook assumed), actually accepted or even encouraged her smitten young nephew's adoration?

"Why don't you just ask Danny if the crazy aunt popped his cherry?" Ketchum had inquired of the cook. That was a vulgar Coos County expression, and the cook hated it. (If he'd paid closer attention to the conversations around him in Boston, the cook might have realized that "cherry-popping" was a vulgar North End expression, too.)

There was one part of The Spinster; or, The Maiden Aunt that both Tony Angel and Ketchum had loved: the wedding at the end. The boy has grown up and he's marrying his college sweetheart--an indifferent bride, if you ever met one, and closer to a real-life Katie character than Caitlin in The Kennedy Fathers ever was. Also, Danny had nailed those ice-cube-sucking Callahan men dead between their eyes--those tight-assed patrician Republicans who, Danny believed, had made Katie the anarchist rule-breaker she was. She was a trust-fund kid who'd reinvented herself as a radical, but she'd been a faux revolutionary. Katie's only revolution had been a small, sexual one.

THERE WAS ONE BOOK Danny Angel had written that was not on the kitchen bookshelf in Avellino. That was his sixth novel, which h

ad not yet been published. But the cook had almost finished reading it. A copy of the galleys was upstairs in Tony Angel's bedroom. Ketchum also had a copy. Both men felt ambivalent about the novel, and neither was in any hurry to finish it.

East of Bangor was set in an orphanage in Maine in the 1960s--when abortion was still illegal. Virtually the same damn boy from those earlier Danny Angel novels--a boy from Boston who ends up going away to boarding school--gets two of his North End cousins pregnant, one when he's still a student at Exeter (before he's learned to drive) and the second after he's gone off to college. He goes to the University of New Hampshire, naturally.

There's an old midwife in the Maine orphanage who performs abortions--a deeply sympathetic woman who struck the cook as being modeled on the unlikely fusion of sweet, gentle Paul Polcari ("the fucking pacifist!" as Ketchum insisted on calling him) and Injun Jane.