Random House. 564 pp. $28

The novel opens as a young boy, recently arrived at a logging camp on the Twisted River in New Hampshire, loses his balance and is swept under the moving logs. In a roundabout way, indirection being this author's favorite way of getting from here to there, this disaster is what eventually will set the camp cook, Dominic Baciagalupo, and his son Danny on a 50-year odyssey through a typically Irvingesque thicket of unexpected encounters and missed opportunities.

Their wanderings are triggered, most of all, by the solid conviction of Ketchum, a rugged and fearsomely opinionated logger, that they are pursued by the camp's vicious policeman, Constable Carl, who blames Dominic for yet another death.

Eventually Ketchum will exact his own unique sort of vengeance on the camp on the Twisted River, but in the meantime, he continually warns the exiles of Carl's thirst for blood - first by means of collect calls, frequent visits to their several hiding places, and letters written in a "positively girlish handwriting," and later by means of a donated fax machine.

Touching down, first in Boston, then in Iowa City, then in Vermont, and finally in Toronto, the two refugees gradually settle into their futures. Daniel Baciagalupo, with the encouragement of one of his teachers, wins a scholarship to a New England prep school; later he attends the Iowa Writers Workshop, marries a woman for whom marriage and motherhood are both political acts, has a son with her, and becomes a successful novelist named, in deference to Ketchum's concerns, Danny Angel.

His father, to save on uncomfortable explanations, becomes Tony Angel and accompanies him, finding work as a cook in restaurants wherever they happen to be, enhancing his basic mastery of Italian cooking with an easy familiarity with first Chinese and later French cuisine - a combination that results in some pretty odd menu options, but ones that meet with near unanimous customer approval.

As the multilevel plot meanders toward what we begin to suspect may be a violent end, those familiar with Irving's work will notice some customary devices in operation. There are, first of all, recurring and unexpected appearances, such as that of the naked skydiver, christened "Lady Sky" by Danny's young son Joe as she descends toward an ignominious landing in a pigpen, the several large and angry dogs, the sinister blue customized Mustang driven way too fast, the bears, both real and imaginary (we've surely seen them before), and, most peculiarly, a cast-iron skillet. As he has previously, the author treats such oddities as motifs, each signaling a transforming event to come.

Also familiar is the foreshadowing. Disasters and plot twists are suggested long before they occur, building a curious kind of tension throughout the novel, as was the case with the murderously errant baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. We can guess what will happen, but when will it happen? How will it happen? Why will it happen? And what will flow from it? Such questions hang over the plot until they are answered in ways that manage, somehow, to be still unexpected and still surprising.

A third device that triggers memories of fictions past is the way the author mines his own history, usually distorting it past easy recognition and employing it in service to the current plot, as he did with his wrestling obsession in The World According to Garp. He does the same thing here, but with even less effort at disguise.

Both Irving and Danny go to the same prep school in New Hampshire, both attend the Iowa Writers Workshop, where both are taught, influenced, and befriended by Kurt Vonnegut. Both teach at the same small liberal arts college in Vermont. Both spend lots of time in Canada. Both seem to write the same kind of books and have similar attitudes toward writing and writers.

Despite all this, Last Night in Twisted River is not an autobiographical novel, at least not exactly. Instead, what the author has done is re-create landscapes familiar to him, then populate them with his wholly fictional creations moving toward wholly fictional ends.

Where it all does lead is to a novel that feels a lot like life writ large, filled with the kind of unplanned accidents and haphazard moments, sudden threats and humorous asides that we can all recognize, even if we are not always looking over our shoulder for our own particular version of Constable Carl.