Last Night in Twisted River
By John Irving
Bloomsbury £20, 576 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.99

It’s not difficult to make the case that John Irving is the greatest American novelist of his generation. Irving is not a literary establishment figure in the same way as Philip Roth or John Updike, nor a left-field campus doyen such as Kurt Vonnegut or Ray Bradbury. It’s hard to imagine him at ease at New Yorker cocktail parties, or enthusiastically holding court with earnest young students on the state of the novel. You sense that he would rather be back in the New England inhabited by many of his often working-class characters, which he draws with such empathy. It’s somewhat erroneous and unquestioningly indulgent – but nonetheless tempting – to think of Irving as literature’s Bruce Springsteen.

Of all the great American novelists of his generation, he has been the timeless one who has unerringly delivered; in any decade a John Irving book is a genuine event. His novels are always, at the least, very, very good, whereas many of his contemporaries, having cemented their reputations with earlier works, have often produced patchier subsequent offerings; the need for statement-making occasionally seeming to eclipse the nuts and bolts of novelistic construction.

Irving has never permitted himself that extravagance, and this mindset is a clue to his consistency. He’s very aware that the inspired artist lurking within a novelist is set free only by the endeavours of the bleary-eyed craftsman. While every worthwhile writer instinctively knows this, very few touched by his level of success have been as adept at keeping it to the forefront of their psyche. This quality makes his new novel, Last Night in Twisted River, the great success and sheer reading pleasure that it is.

The book starts off in 1954 with a logging accident in Coos County, a remote corner of northern New Hampshire, in which a boy is tragically killed. His death has an impact on a crusty riverman, Ketchum, his crippled cook friend Dominic, and Dominic’s young son Daniel. It brings to a head a sequence of events that sees Dominic and his son flee from the wrath of a corrupt and violent lawman, Carl, or “cowboy” as he is known. The intensity relentlessly builds over the half-century the book spans. Each element of the story and every era is dealt with convincingly as Irving manages to depict well postwar America, the 1960s and Vietnam, the 1980s and the internet age, without detracting from the story or his careful construction of his characters’ respective psychologies.

Irving is a master at interweaving lives to build up dramatic events, which then explode across the pages of the novel. The book is rich in detail, yet never less than a page-turner. While the characters’ frailties are exposed, their humanity is preserved, so we never stop caring for them. Even the two women from Coos County who spitefully rat out Dominic to Carl have their behaviour explained, if not vindicated, by their history with the cook and his son.

Much of the story is told through Daniel’s eyes. He’s a writer, but Last Night in Twisted River never feels like just another book about writers writing about being writers. That said, there are more pertinent observations here on the reality of a novelist’s life than in just about anything I can recall reading. But all the protagonists are given air time, and Last Night in Twisted River is as much about being a cook (or a logger), evoking the senses to the extent that the reader might crave a visit to their local Italian restaurant long before the final chapter.

Big themes emerge through the sprawling narrative. Coos County, “where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course...”, is a metaphor for an America that embraces the politics of fear and lends credence to small-minded, controlling tyrants. So it’s inevitably condemned to relive a shifting but recurring nightmare; from McCarthy and cold war paranoia to Nixon and Vietnam, through to Reagan, the Bushes and the current Middle East quagmire.

The novel is about exile, both literal and emotional, whereby free-thinking Americans who refuse to join in the loud-mouthed cheerleading are always, in some way, on the run from those malign forces.

The crazy and disastrous war in Iraq, pursued throughout generations by the Bush dynasty, and to the detriment of the Afghanistan-orientated battle against terrorism, is mirrored in the ageing lawman Carl’s violence against those weaker than him (largely women, in his case), his obsession with the decent and popular Dominic, and his fear of the libertarian logger Ketchum, who sees the fundamental cowardice behind his brass-hearted and gruff front.

It’s Ketchum who emerges as the moral centre of the book. The riverman who lives life on his own terms is squarely in the tradition of American outlaws and anti- heroes, yet is far too carefully observed to ever become a cliché. Inevitably, he forces himself to pay the full price for his perceived personal failings, right up to the harrowing – but uplifting – climax of the book.

Last Night in Twisted River is a novel of excellence. This big-hearted, brilliantly written and superbly realised inter-generational tale of a father and son on the lam, and their flawed protector, stands comparison with the very best of Irving’s previous work. It is absolutely unmissable.

Irvine Welsh is author of ‘Crime’ (Vintage) and ‘Reheated Cabbage’ (Jonathan Cape)