John Irving has always called himself an underdog, and he still talks like one &mdash; even at 67, even wildly famous as one of America&rsquo;s great storytellers, even at the release of his 12th novel, certain to be a best-seller.</p><p>Maybe he feels goaded. A recent review of &ldquo;Last Night in Twisted River&rdquo; used such words as tricked-up, gimmicky, cartoony, cheesy and preposterous &mdash; all in the first sentence. (Although the reviewer, the famously harsh New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, kindly followed up with &ldquo;deeply felt&rdquo; and &ldquo;often moving.&rdquo;)</p><p>Irving defends his love for the expansive novel with quirky characters and intricate plots full of surprises, but he doesn&rsquo;t apologize. Nor does he apologize for recurring Irving-esque elements, including bears, severed body parts and wrestling.</p><p>At this point &mdash; Irving wrote his first novel more than 40 years ago and became an icon in 1978 with &ldquo;The World According to Garp&rdquo; &mdash; does he need to?</p><p>&ldquo;Last Night in Twisted River&rdquo; tells the story of a father and son, Dominic and Danny Baciagalupo. It covers 51 years, as Danny grows from a 12-year-old involved in a gruesome accident to a novelist whose writing career much resembles Irving&rsquo;s.</p><p>We talked to Irving by phone about his new novel and the writing life. He was on the road on the West Coast and comes to Kansas City Thursday. Irving lives in Toronto and Vermont and spends part of his summers on an island in Lake Huron. He has three sons, the youngest 18, and four grandchildren.</p><p>The conversation was condensed and edited.</p><p><strong>Q. How long has this novel been in the works?</strong></p><p><strong>A. </strong>This novel has been in my mind longer than any other, for 20 years. It was always in my mind a fugitive novel about a cook and his pre-teenage son. Something violent happens in the early going of the story and forces them to go on the run. And they are running for more than 50 years.</p><p>But I don&rsquo;t begin a novel on the basis of how long I&rsquo;ve had it mind.</p><p><strong>What is the process?</strong></p><p>I don&rsquo;t start writing a novel until I not only see what happens at the end of the story but until I&rsquo;ve actually written the last sentence. In 12 novels now, that last sentence hasn&rsquo;t changed, not even the punctuation.</p><p>Once I get that sentence, I make a kind of road map for the story back to where I think it should begin. I sort of plot a novel from back to front. When I get the first sentence, however many months after I get the last sentence, only then do I begin writing the book.</p><p>That process from getting the last sentence to getting the first sentence sometimes takes a year, sometimes 18 months. Then once I start writing the book, with the fates of my characters already known to me, I&rsquo;m concentrating on the language.</p><p><strong>You&rsquo;ve written shorter pieces, screenplays, including the one for &ldquo;The Cider House Rules,&rdquo; for which you won an Academy Award. But you seem to prefer the sprawling novel. This one covers 50 years of these characters&rsquo; lives.</strong></p><p>I&rsquo;ll tell you the reason. Passage of time is as important as any major or minor character in 10 of the 12 novels I&rsquo;ve written. It is one of the reasons I like writing novels, to show the effects of the passage of time on the principal characters. To give the arc of a whole life.</p><p>Now the second longest of my novels is &ldquo;A Son of the Circus,&rdquo; and there&rsquo;s not an appreciable passage of time. One of my shortest novels, &ldquo;The Fourth Hand,&rdquo; also falls into that category. But that&rsquo;s two out of 12.