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Last night, John Irving, National Book Award-winning author of twelve novels, including The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Cider House Rules and his latest, Last Night at Twisted River, appeared in conversation with UC Davis Director of Creative Writing, Pam Houston, before an appreciative full-house at downtown’s Crest Theater, as part of California Lectures’ 2009-2010 line-up of literary speakers.

Irving told the audience he writes according to novelist Herman Melville’s warning, “Woe to him that seeks to please rather than to appall,” saying that his goal is “not only to frighten readers, making them anxious for the fates of characters I have made them like,” but also to frighten himself, by looking directly at the things he fears most.

Irving teased reviewers who “trivialize and ransack” his fiction looking for facts from his own biography. “If readers want to know the important connection between my books and my life, they would look at the way my books obsessively return to the things I most fear, things that have never happened to me, but which I obsessively imagine.”

Irving said that his stories, including Twisted River, are full of dying children and spouses and other catastrophes that befall characters who set tragedy in motion by keeping secrets. In his fiction, he said, “there is always danger in a family that hides relevant information from its children.”

Though Irving clearly preferred not to focus on the connections between the facts of his biography and his fiction, he did respond to questions on the topic, saying that every word spoken by the character Kurt Vonnegut to writer Danny Angel in Twisted River is taken from Irving’s memory of things the real life Slaughterhouse-Five author told Irving as his mentor at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

At a post-lecture dinner at The Grange Restaurant and Bar in the Citizen Hotel, Irving told his favorite story about Vonnegut. Dining out together one night at a tony New York restaurant, Vonnegut began to cough uncontrollably. Because his grandfather had choked to death at a Christmas Eve dinner, Irving began to panic at the thought of reliving the experience with his mentor. Irving jumped up to administer the Heimlich, but because Vonnegut was over six feet tall, and Irving is five foot seven, the physics would not work. Irving threw Vonnegut to the floor, where he landed on all fours.  Irving swiftly moved behind him, wrestler-like, and squeezed Vonnegut’s torso repeatedly. Finally Vonnegut was able to stop Irving, gasping “John, I’m not choking. I’ve got emphysema.” The wrong-headed rescue left Vonnegut with a broken rib and some entertaining headlines in the next day's New York papers.

At the end of the evening, when asked if he was ever surprised by the reading public in big cities or small towns, Irving answered that there is no way to predict the quality of thinking in a community, as he has lectured in huge cities, like London, that were extremely provincial in their ideas and limited in their reading, and small towns, like Lake Forest Park, Washington, where everyone appears to read everything, and to have something intelligent to say about it. Irving said he did find it sad, though, that he sells so many more books in the Netherlands than he does in the United States.