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Sex, Secrets and Absent Fathers: It’s the New John Irving, Of Course

At 900 pages, “The Last Chairlift,” his 15th novel, is an overstuffed family saga about a screenwriter very much like the author himself.

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This is an illustration of an empty chairlift atop a snowy mountain silhouetted against a dramatic purple and gold sky.

By Alexandra Jacobs

THE LAST CHAIRLIFT, by John Irving

An awful lot happens to Adam Brewster, the protagonist of John Irving’s new novel, “The Last Chairlift.” Indeed, it would hardly be an Irving novel if it weren’t stuffed — sometimes overstuffed, like one of those sofas with the springs coming out at odd angles.

But the main event is probably when Adam’s athletic, unmarried mother, Rachel “Little Ray” Brewster, straddles him, age 13, in bed, presses his shoulders down to the mattress and gives him the kind of “lawless” kiss she’s just planted on a prospective new boyfriend.

In a page or two, Adam — named for the Bible’s first man, narrating in the first person — rapid-shuffles through all the conflicted feelings of an incest victim: curiosity, fright, confusion, indignation, loyalty.

Then the thrilling and anxious descent into secrecy. “When you keep secrets from people you love, you don’t sleep as soundly as a child,” says Adam, a novelist, screenwriter and close contemporary of Irving, who himself has told of being sexually abused by a woman when he was 11. “That’s when you know the growing up has happened, though you still have more growing up ahead of you — I certainly did.”

This is one of the more tender moments in a tough old-fashioned bildungsroman that meanders more than it moves, with its creator’s customary herks, jerks, digressions and Rabelaisian excesses. Readers who hang on for its 900 pages will keep Adam and his extended family close, sometimes claustrophobic company over nearly eight decades, from the familiar Irving haunt of Exeter, N.H., in midcentury; to Reagan-era New York City and the Roman Catholic Church’s callousness about the AIDS crisis; to Trump’s election and Toronto (where Irving has lived since 2014).

The book is generously intertextual, with allusions to “Moby-Dick” and “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Great Expectations”; to John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut and Graham Greene; and, more surprisingly, to Ludwig Bemelmans’s “Madeline.” We also get an amusing taxonomy of film noir that includes creepy noir, caper noir, gunfighter noir, porno noir. “When you’re over 30, and you smile like a kid, there’s something noir about it,” Adam observes.

Irving, the onetime wunderkind, is now 50 years over 30, and he has mortality — and perhaps legacy — on his mind. His breakout blockbuster “The World According to Garp” was published in 1978; he has had several megahits since (“The Cider House Rules”; “A Prayer for Owen Meany” ; “A Widow for One Year” ) but also a few clunkers. Like Adam a former competitive wrestler, Irving the literato tends to wriggle from analytical grasp, defying easy categorization. An older male friend believes him “somewhat of an airport paperback novelist … in a good way.” Well, his latest will certainly keep you occupied, if intermittently lulled and grossed out, from J.F.K. to Sydney .

“The Last Chairlift,” Irving’s 15th novel (and, he has avowed, his last long one ), was at first titled “Darkness as a Bride,” from Claudio’s line in “Measure for Measure” about embracing death, now the epigraph. Darkness is also a prerequisite for the movies, and unmade ones haunt Adam Brewster; sections of the book are delivered in script form. The dramatis personae include a gaggle of ghosts, who begin to appear to our hero soon after “the kiss of questionable judgment.”

One of them may be Adam’s absent father — absent fathers being another Irving staple — about whom his mother, a ski instructor who refers to Adam as “my one and only,” has been mysteriously coy. The novel’s new title suggests a final chance at ascending the heavens, or something more ominous: one more bumpy run before the whole operation shuts down.

Irvingworld conjures nostalgia for when novel-writing felt more muscular — sport-like, even, when novelists were celebrities duking it out on talk shows . But this sustained sojourn can feel like an unrelenting avalanche of words from which one emerges blinking and dazed — a book to be not so much read as survived.

Irving has long maimed and killed off characters in shocking and unlikely ways, and blood spills so rapidly from “The Last Chairlift” that — maybe because Adam journeys with young son and hostile wife in tow to a historic and spooky Colorado hotel — one can get the uneasy feeling that he is duetting with another Master of the Middlebrow: Stephen King .

Adam will watch as relatives are struck by lightning; trapped under a derailed train; gunned down in a comedy club called the Gallows Lounge; run off the road in a truck while listening to a song called “No Lucky Star,” sung by a performer from the Gallows, also doomed, named Damaged Don.

The Brewsters are a peculiar bunch, forever dithering over sleeping arrangements, to the clucking disapproval of Little Ray’s sisters. (“Unkind critics have complained how I dispatch, or dispose of, the unlikable aunts in my fiction, but these critics never knew Aunt Abigail or Aunt Martha,” Adam writes.) Like episodes from “Friends,” his girlfriends will be given nicknames like “The One With the Limp” and “The Tall One With Her Arm in the Cast.” They will bleed from fibroids, tumble down stairs headfirst and lose bowel control in his bed. Genitals are cringingly squashed and assessed. “I hear you’ve got a vagina as big as a ballroom ,” Little Ray sneers to one of her son’s older lovers on the phone.

Irving is gentlest to Elliot Barlow, a diminutive schoolteacher who will become Adam’s stepfather, and to Adam’s cousin Nora, a lesbian who does a stand-up gig at the Gallows called “Two Dykes, One Who Talks” with her girlfriend Em, who pantomimes instead of speaking. The only thing we hear out of Em’s mouth in the first part of the book is an orgasm so loud and sustained it causes a waitress to drop her tray, spill a water pitcher and fall to her knees. “I’d heard nothing like it, not even in foreign films with subtitles,” Adam writes. He’s still talking about this impressive climax on Page 866.

Irving has been a longtime champion of queerness in his novels, even if “queer” in this one is used only in the old, derogatory, unclaimed sense. Little Ray’s main squeeze turns out to be a trail groomer named Molly (often called just “the trail groomer”). Elliot (“the snowshoer”) will eventually transition genders, a change that provokes Adam's affection and protectiveness. “There’s more than one way to love people, Kid,” Molly tells him, in one of this book’s occasional aww , amber-lit asides.

Preachy and tauntingly bawdy in patches, “The Last Chairlift” does have pleasurable stretches, when the air is clear and the terrain smooth. But unless you’re an Irving superfan craving a big summing-up, the novel’s muchness might simply suffocate.

THE LAST CHAIRLIFT, by John Irving | 912 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $38

Alexandra Jacobs is a book critic and the author of “Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch.” More about Alexandra Jacobs

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Colorado’s ski slopes in The Last Chairlift

The Last Chairlift by John Irving review – an outlandish family epic

Unconventional characters, uncertain paternity issues: Irving’s 15th novel retreads familiar ground, but is overlong and poorly edited

T his novel is not for those without readerly stamina. At 912 pages, you are going to have to love John Irving dearly, or have a passion for reading novels come hell or high water. If the former, then it’s hard to see the publication of The Last Chairlift as anything other than good news, in so far as there’s now a great deal more Irving to read. But what about those of us in the latter camp who are only, say, Irving-curious?

The first thing to note is that this is Irving’s 15th novel – and that he is now 80. By any measure, he has been a hugely successful writer, and has touched millions of hearts: The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany were massive global hits. This book retreads familiar Irving territory: uncertain paternity issues; long passages about wrestling; unconventional people in conventional small town New England; physically small characters; characters who are writers; a mute character; lots of discussion of cinema; a great deal of sex and sexual politics.

This is the story of Adam Brewster’s life and family from the 1940s to almost the present day. His mother, Little Ray, a ski instructor, won’t tell him who his father is, but is happily in a lifelong relationship with Molly. Later, in a marriage of convenience (but also of love and respect), Little Ray formally weds Mr Barlow, who transitions from male to female during the course of the novel. We also meet Adam’s grandparents, his aunts, his uncles and several of his variously banjaxed girlfriends.

The best of the novel comes in Irving’s unusual scene writing, and this remains his great imaginative strength. He consistently avoids the cliches of setup and setting and deftly draws you in as a witness to the outlandish. Adam is in bed with Jasmine, one of his ill-fated girlfriends, for example, and the ghost of his grandfather appears, naked except for his nappy. Then the grandfather “squatted, grunting. Could ghosts crap? Did they? … Not to be outdone … Jasmine – still standing on the bed – let her bowels go ...” Enter Dottie, an elderly carer and “fix-it person”, looking like “the Angel of Death”, covered in pale face cream and wearing a contraption like a lampshade around her head. “Looks like your lady-friend shoulda been wearin’ the diaper.”

By contrast, there’s a very moving and – again – oddly original scene when Adam goes to recover the corpses of a couple who have decided to end their lives together at the top of the ski slopes following a cancer diagnosis, and rides the chairlift down between the two frozen bodies. “I sat close… holding them tight … I admired the life they had made together, and how they’d chosen to end it.”

Initially, I relished the assembly of characters – the different sexualities at play, the transgressive mother, Mr Barlow. But part of me could not help but feel that after 900 pages I had learned very little about the experience of a fellow human being transitioning genders, for example. Or what really caused Em, the mute character, to talk? And sure, I was interested in the son-kissing mother, but disappointed that all she really does is giggle and behave elliptically, so that it became harder and harder to take the Oedipal notes of the story seriously. It would be overstating the case to say that Irving is merely gestural in this book, but it’s as though he brilliantly imagines scenes and characters and then omits to give the latter much interesting or plausible interiority – like writing a screenplay and relying on a director or actors to bring the depth.

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Nor did I get along with Irving’s folksy and self-conscious humour. He uses the wry formulation “sleeping arrangements”, for example, over and over again; ostensibly to mock those who might object to them, and conversely to assert that the novel has no problem with who has sex with whom. But the repetition makes you feel that the text is protesting too much, and that the book covertly participates in exactly the same prurience it purports to decry.

Irving has been compared to Dickens, but on the evidence of this novel that is far-fetched. He has little of Dickens’s sophisticated and multivalent command of register, and only a fraction of his psychological dexterity. His vocabulary lacks invention and his word selection is staunchly unremarkable. I’m afraid the book is also very poorly edited – if at all. There’s a lot of tedious repetition, while at one point Irving plonks over 150 pages of screenplay in the middle of the text. In it, there’s a line of dialogue that reads: “Unrevised real life is just a mess.” Unrevised manuscripts – the same.

John Irving

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John Irving’s ‘The Last Chairlift’ is more of the same. A lot more.

At 889 pages, John Irving’s new novel, “ The Last Chairlift ,” is an imposing brick of paper. This is, in every way, Irving cubed.

I have no objection to long books. My favorite novel last year was “ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois ,” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, which also clocks in at more than 800 pages. But Jeffers has a lot to say. Irving has a lot to say again.

That sense of deja vu stems from Irving’s devotion to a particular set of themes and motifs: hotels, wrestling, absent fathers, sexual gymnastics, etc. But the familiarity of those elements also speaks to his mountainous presence in contemporary literature since the late 1960s. Over a dozen years, starting in 1978, Irving published four remarkable novels in a row: “ The World According to Garp ,” “ The Hotel New Hampshire ,” “ The Cider House Rules ” and “ A Prayer for Owen Meany .” Popular and critically acclaimed movie adaptations have sewn Irving’s stories even more broadly into American culture.

Now, at the age of 80, Irving has published his 15th novel, another persistently familiar, partially autobiographical epic about a man enduring a series of erotic and violent episodes. Fans of the author’s work may appreciate the invitation to survey this vast rearrangement of his cherished tropes. Who, after all, isn’t cheered to see the old Christmas decorations brought down from the attic one more time? But everyone is likely to sympathize with the narrator of “The Last Chairlift,” who confesses on Page 856, “It seemed to me I was reading forever.”

Like the Bible, this sprawling book begins with the mysterious creation of Adam. His mother, a lesbian nicknamed Little Ray, refuses to identify Adam’s dad. We’re told only that her coupling — possibly with an actor or maybe a child — was a singular event. Ray’s censorious sisters are scandalized; her father, a retired teacher at Exeter Academy, sobs and then refuses to speak ever again. “My mother wanted nothing to do with men,” Adam says, “only me.”

Her devotion is complicated, as you might expect in a New England family whose issues “are all about sex.” An expert ski instructor, Ray spends six months of the year away on the slopes, which Adam resents. But she makes it up to him when she comes back home. Ray and Adam “cuddle together” in a twin bed long past the age when that might be considered appropriate. On one particularly memorable night, Ray straddles her son’s hips and holds his shoulders down hard. “When you’re thirteen,” Adam says, “and your mother gives you your first good kiss, you better hope someone matches it or eclipses it — soon.”

Actually, you’d better hope someone matches you with a therapist — soon.

Instead, Ray and Adam remain entangled with each other’s lives in a way that feels alternately sweet and cringe-inducing. Over the years, Ray counsels her son through a string of comic disasters with “girlfriends who were predisposed to tragedy.” There’s “The Strong One on Crutches,” “The Tall One with Her Arm in a Cast” and, not to be outdone, “The Bleeder,” who goes on and on about her fibroids while making love, doing the laundry, eating breakfast.

You wouldn’t know it from Adam’s congenial demeanor, but having sex with him is risky business. Young women get stuck in showers, they fall down stairs, they wreak havoc. Nothing fazes Adam’s mother, though. She patiently advises caution and mends injuries like some kind of sexual coach. When a young woman named Maud gets out of hand while climaxing, Adam says, “It was my mom who unwrapped Maud’s legs from around me, and pulled me off her.” Where’s a bear when you need one?

These erotic adventures subject poor Adam’s penis to much distress and discussion. It should come as no surprise that Herman Melville’s “ Moby-Dick ” is a literary touchstone throughout “The Last Chairlift,” and eighth-grade boys the world over would be impressed by the number of prurient jokes that Irving derives from Melville’s title.

For his part, Adam has a profound effect on his mother’s romantic life, too. He sets her up with Elliot Barlow, an unusually tiny man who is his favorite teacher at Exeter Academy. That Elliot has no sexual interest in women only helps make him the perfect husband for Adam’s gay mom. “Two beards are better than one,” a friend says. And their marriage ceremony is one of the most brilliantly choreographed calamities that Irving has ever written — complete with a deadly act of God, an earth-shattering orgasm and an old man wearing only a diaper who runs around on all fours, biting guests’ ankles. (It must also be noted that Jonathan Franzen is no longer the leading user of human poo in a literary novel. In “The Last Chairlift,” even the ghosts lose control of their bowels. You have been warned.)

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Ostensibly, this is the story of a writer’s development, but, like so many of Irving’s novels, its real impulse is a reconception of family. Is there another major straight male author who has been such a consistent and daring explorer of the great spectrum of human desire? Ray may sound like an Oedipal nightmare, but she makes her son feel safe and loved. Even as Mr. Barlow transitions to become a woman, Adam knows Elliot is the best dad a guy could have. And Adam’s dearest friends are a cousin and her female lover, who communicates only through pantomime. Irving pushes hard on the iconoclastic nature of these characters only to emphasize their ordinariness as devoted family members. The night Adam’s mother gets married, her real partner tells him, “There’s more than one way to love people.”

That’s a beautiful theme, and there’s a wonderful novel about that theme trapped in this great ordeal of printed matter. Early in the story, Adam says: “My life is a movie because I’m a screenwriter. I’m first and foremost a novelist, but even when I write a novel, I’m a visualizer.”

It would be more accurate to say that at his best he’s a visualizer. The most arresting sections of “The Last Chairlift” are powerfully cinematic scenes — either comic or violent. Irving’s portrayal of a shooting in a crowded venue, for instance, is rendered with such visual acuity and kinetic energy that I’d swear I saw it rather than read it. And 200 pages of this novel are presented as the script for a movie about Adam returning to the hotel where he was conceived.

In such sections — and whenever “The Last Chairlift” is actively expanding the boundaries of what a family can be — the story feels vital and exciting. But when Adam says, “Yes, I know — I’m leaving too much out,” the irony combined with my shredded patience made me tear up a little bit.

Despite their autobiographical elements, the sections about Adam’s success as an author and his move to Canada feel perfunctory and devoid of life. And far too many chapters sound self-indulgent and redundant. That problem becomes acute in long, artless passages of editorializing — about, say, Ronald Reagan or the Catholic Church — that have all the considered insight of barbershop chatter.

“How many times do I have to say it?” Adam asks. “Unrevised, real life is just a mess.”

Books, too.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.

The Last Chairlift

By John Irving

Simon & Schuster. 889 pp. $38

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THE LAST CHAIRLIFT

by John Irving ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

A book that will try a reader’s patience but may also reward it.

Familiar Irving themes and autobiographical points mark this sprawling family tale.

Narrator Adam Brewster is a lucky bastard. His short and unwed mother, Ray, is gay but marries even shorter Elliot, an English teacher and wrestler at Adam’s New Hampshire school, who's fine with Ray living part of the year elsewhere with her female partner, Molly, and will eventually transition genders. At the wedding, Adam hears the epic orgasms experienced by Em, the partner of his cousin Nora. They perform, in some of the novel’s best moments, at a comedy club as Two Dykes, One Who Talks , with Nora interpreting Em’s pantomime. Adam, seen from childhood to old age, is lucky to be raised and surrounded by women who are smart, loving, and supportive. Still, he spends most of the book trying to find out more about his father, someone Ray met in 1941 when she was a teenager at a hotel in Aspen, Colorado. The likely candidate is an actor whose noir films and off-screen life become a major sidebar. The lost paternity that haunts Adam is reflected in actual ghosts that appear haphazardly throughout the novel, sparking a few comic moments but mainly serving to personify his preoccupation with family history. Like Irving, Adam writes three novels before gaining broad fame with his fourth. Also like Irving, he writes for the movies, and twice the narrative switches to lengthy stretches of screenplay format, bringing a welcome briskness to the generally slow pace. Irving’s writing can be painfully plain, short on imagery or elegance and long, oh so long, on repetition. But his imagination and empathy often work to charm a reader when the prose falls short. Here the consistent pleasure is an extended family whose distinctive voices deliver thoughtful messages of tolerance, understanding, and affection for those who are different.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-5011-8927-2

Page Count: 912

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024

One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.

This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.

Pub Date: March 19, 2024

ISBN: 9780385550369

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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Review: 'the last chairlift,' by john irving.

John Irving's 15th novel, "The Last Chairlift," is hard to miss: At more than 900 pages, it rivals the length of "David Copperfield" and "Moby-Dick," two epics he admiringly references throughout the book.

But the new novel's true touchstone is Irving's own fiction. Indeed, the contents of "Chairlift" may be so familiar — a fatherless son, a headstrong mom, wrestling, the writing life, a mute woman, a transsexual friend — that at times it feels like a reboot of his 1978 classic, "The World According to Garp."

But the world has changed since 1978, and Irving has made a few tweaks to the narrative. First, as the book's bulk suggests, is its scope. Ranging from the end of World War II to the Trump era, the novel follows the life, family and romantic failures of its novelist hero, Adam. He aches to learn the identity of his father. But his mother, a ski instructor at a Vermont resort, isn't telling.

"The issues we have," a cousin tells Adam, "are all about sex." True: "Chairlift" is largely about sexual connection, which is sometimes played for laughs, especially around Adam's awkward early experiences. ("You never screw someone in a cast, sweetie — you just don't!" he's told after a bedroom injury.) Sometimes it involves more conventional matters of infidelity.

Within that broad theme, Irving weaves in a few additional ones. Ghosts are a constant presence around Adam, both in Vermont and at an Aspen hotel that plays a central role in the story, symbols of family tragedy and neglected history. Death, too, is always lurking, as Adam mulls his responsibility to himself and others before he loses them. A line from "Moby-Dick" keeps him centered and somewhat optimistic: "Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried."

But if "Chairlift" centers on the big stuff — love, sex, death — it also feels oddly small. Irving tries a couple of rhetorical gambits throughout the novel, most notably two extended sections in screenplay format. Still, Adam's essential quest is straightforward, and the novel's bulk only thins out its urgency. A book half or even a third of its size could have done the job more powerfully.

There are moments, though, when Irving's old magic emerges: his wit and fearlessness around sex, and his grasp of the wide ripple effects of intolerance. "There's more than one way to love people, Kid," young Adam is told early on. If Irving keeps hammering that point, over and over again, it's because he's collected years of evidence that some people never hear it.

Mark Athitakis is a book critic and author of "The New Midwest."

The Last Chairlift

By: John Irving.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 912 pages, $35.

Event: PenPals, 7:30 p.m. March 23, 2023, and 11 a.m. March 24, 2023, Hopkins Center for the Arts, tickets $35-$55. https://www.supporthclib.org/john-irving

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Review: The Last Chairlift

The Last Chairlift , John Irving. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Summary: The son of a former slalom skier tries to make sense of the ghosts he sees, the father he never knew, and the different ways people love, and fail to love.

John Irving has written a number of novels, at least several of which might be judged among the great American novels: Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and The World According to Garp . All of these were written in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Where does this, which Irving describes as his “last long novel” rank among these others? I’ll get to this by the end of this review.

This is definitely a long novel, 889 pages in my edition. It spans the lifetime of the narrator, Adam Brewster, from his conception in 1941 until 2021–eighty years. His mother, Rachel “Little Ray” Brewster was an off-the-podium slalom skier in the 1941 Olympics in Aspen. She comes away, not with a medal, but a pregnancy, after a brief affair with an attractive young boy hanging around the Jerome Hotel who she never contacts again. She describes Adam as her “one and only,” which has more than one meaning for her.

He’s raised mostly by his grandmother and increasingly demented grandfather, the “Diaper Man.” Little Ray is gone in the winter months, working as a ski instructor and living with Molly, a trail groomer. But she and Adam are close–in fact so close she sleeps with him into adolescence–including one instance with unconsummated sexual overtones.

An English teacher in town eventually becomes a mentor. Elliot Barlow coaches wrestling as well as Adam’s writing aspirations. He’s small, but strong not only physically but in other ways. Adam, who hates skiing, despite his mother, takes to snowshoeing with Elliot. Little Ray meets him and they fall for each other.

Their wedding is a series of bizarre incidents including everyone overhearing niece Nora and her companion, the mute Em as Em climaxes. The wedding is accompanied by a zithermeister. A storm hits and the Diaper Man is electrocuted. And Adam stumbles upon his mother and Molly in bed together. It turns out that the marriage of Little Ray and Elliot is cover for both, even though they really do love each other, but not as man and wife. Elliot wants to be a woman, and eventually transitions and becomes “she.”

Adam learns that there are many ways for people to love each other. And the book depicts many ways people have sex with each other, including Adam in his attic, along with the ghosts, which literally scare the crap out of one girlfriend. In fact, the book seems to describe the varieties of sexual relationship other than a reasonably healthy marital one (Adam’s son is conceived before his marriage). And we hear about it in several chapters set at the Gallows, a New York comedy club where Nora and Em have an act, Two Dykes, One Who Talks . Nora does the talking and Em mimes, off stage as well as on. It is an odd set of relationships and yet they all care deeply for each other, and especially for Adam.

I mentioned ghosts. Adam not only sees the ghost of the Diaper Man, who hangs about the house, but a group that hangs around the Jerome Hotel–miners, Mr. Jerome, a maid, and others including a small, young, early adolescent boy wearing an oversized sweater and girlish ski hat. Unlikely as it seems, he begins to wonder if this might be his father. Then he sees the work of screenwriter and actor Paul Goode, whose resemblance to both the boy and to Adam himself is striking. Adam wonders if his own growing talent as a writer and his screenwriting aspirations come from his father.

There are two climactic scenes at the Jerome, both marked with tragedy. Both are written as screenplays rather than regular text and in them Adam encounters Goode, all too briefly. More significantly, they mark a transition of Adam from a serial lover to a father, even as his own marriage is breaking up and he is transitioning to the most enduring, albeit, unusual relationship that lasts to the end of the book.

The last chairlift. Chairlifts are a place of death throughout this novel, one tragic and others where the last chairlift marks a fitting coda on the lives of those brought down the mountain for the last time. One wonders if Irving sees this story as a coda, a last chairlift in his life. He explores in unconventional ways the themes of love and death so basic to literature, the sexual politics of his (and my) generation including the neglect of the Reagan administration toward AIDs, as well as the search for a missing parent that haunts so many young.

So what do I make of this work? Overall, I felt it undisciplined and overlong. I wonder if it tries to do too much. It seemed at times like a series of short stories (or screenplays) written by the narrator stitched into a book relatively unedited. Yet Irving gives us memorable characters, humorous moments, and a complicated yet coherent plot arc. I don’t consider it among his greatest works yet it bears the marks of his skill and his sensibilities. And for many readers, that is reason enough to engage “this last long novel.”

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the last chairlift.

John Irving is often accused of rewriting his own autobiography in each novel he produces (which is highly unfair considering the well-worn writer’s adage “write what you know”). Sure, his writing is self-referential. He draws from his own experiences, but that’s where it ends.

The reader sees similar themes run throughout Irving’s books --- including sex, gender, love, abandonment, orphaned children, prep schools, independent women, New England, and writing as a career. But like a good movie remake or sequel, these references are Easter eggs, nods to familiarity, to the insider who knows his work. They are like comfortable shoes that one wears everyday…because why would you wear something else?

"For the true Irving devotee, THE LAST CHAIRLIFT...has it all, and then some. For those unfamiliar with Irving, start with an earlier work, and fall in love with his ability to create realistically absurd scenarios and enthrallingly memorable characters."

That’s where Irving excels. He gives us what we, his fans, want from him, but he also takes us down different and unexpected paths each time. He engages the reader right from the start in THE LAST CHAIRLIFT with a likable albeit unconventional narrator, Adam, who is struggling with issues of identity.

Reminiscent of Irving’s most notable character Garp (and yet not), Adam is the only child of Rachel, or Little Ray, as she is known in the family. A one-time Olympic hopeful, Rachel is a seasonal ski instructor who disappears for months at a time, leaving Adam to be raised by his extended family of eccentric individuals (like a grandfather who appears as a ghost later, dressed solely in a diaper). There is an assemblage of characters --- gay, straight, trans, mute, moaning, dead, ghostly, short, wrestling, skiing --- but at the heart of the book is a child-man searching for answers he may never get.

Irving is not a clichéd writer. His scenes are often surprisingly delightful in their departure from expectation, which I have always loved about his work. You don’t see what’s coming, despite how visual his writing is. When it lands, you can’t help but be transfixed by both the stellar landing and the sheer uniqueness of it. A few examples include the transition of Rachel’s husband of convenience to a woman, Adam’s escorting of two corpses down a mountain slope on the titular chairlift, a girlfriend’s bowel evacuation in bed --- all astonishing scenes that result in the shake of a reader’s head and a tandem smile. The book is rife with these vignettes, as is any Irving novel. These are quirky characters living life to its quirkiest.

An Irving book would not be complete without commentary on the larger issues of life and the world. Acceptance is at the heart of this novel, whether familial, societal, sexual or political. Irving touches on it all in this 900-plus-page volume. “There is more than one way to love people,” says one pivotal character, a line that speaks to the core of the story, if not all of Irving’s oeuvre. At base, Adam, a struggling screenwriter, is witnessing and discovering love in all its permutations.

For the true Irving devotee, THE LAST CHAIRLIFT (which he has stated will be his last novel) has it all, and then some. For those unfamiliar with Irving, start with an earlier work, and fall in love with his ability to create realistically absurd scenarios and enthrallingly memorable characters. You will appreciate this voluminous book more if you are familiar with and have grown to adore what Irving is inviting you to experience.

Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara on October 21, 2022

The Last Chairlift by John Irving

Publication Date: October 3, 2023
Genres: Fiction
Paperback: 912 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN-10: 150118928X
ISBN-13: 9781501189289

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Review: John Irving writes long tale ‘The Last Chairlift’

This cover image released by Simon & Schuste shows “The Last Chairlift” by John Irving. (Simon & Schuste via AP)

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“The Last Chairlift” by John Irving (Simon & Schuster)

After 54 years and 15 novels, John Irving’s finally done it. He’s written a book longer than most editions of “Moby-Dick.” And by the time you’re done reading it, you’ll chuckle every time you see the hyphen in Melville’s title.

It’s difficult to do justice to this book in a short review. Every Irving fan will read it and even readers trying Irving for the first time will find it an accessible introduction to the New England-born novelist whose work has always been stuffed with serious themes like religion, sex and politics, tempered by a fair dose of satire and absurdity, delivered by narrators in an endearing, matter-of-fact prose.

At its heart “The Last Chairlift” is a love story, telling almost the entire life story of its narrator, Adam Brewster, himself a writer growing up in Exeter, New Hampshire, who wrestles, becomes a bestselling novelist, wins an Oscar and earns Canadian citizenship, not unlike Mr. Irving himself. But as narrator Adam admits: “Real life is so sloppy — it’s full of coincidences. Things just happen, random things that have no connection to one another. In good fiction, isn’t everything connected to everything else?” In “The Last Chairlift,” Irving tries to do both — tell a fictional story that is chock full of random events, but make it feel like nothing is random at all in hindsight, as Adam relates it all to us.

At the beginning of the book, Adam doesn’t know who his biological father is. His mother falls in love with an English teacher at Exeter Academy, whom Adam admires for his diminutive stature and his distaste for downhill skiing. Henceforth the man, whose full name is Elliot Barlow, is referred to mostly as “the snowshoer.” (Adam’s mom, called Little Ray, is also very small. She’s a ski instructor, always doing lunges and wall sits around the house and decamping for the winter months to live in Manchester, New Hampshire, closer to the ski mountain that pays the bills.)

Without spoiling too much, it turns out that Ray isn’t really into men anymore, if she ever was, and while “the snowshoer” is a constant companion for the rest of her days and a father figure to Adam, it’s a ski patroller named Molly who captures Little Ray’s heart.

True to form for an Irving novel, sex is a frequent topic of discussion and driver of the plot. There’s an unusual frankness among Adam’s extended family about his formative sexual experiences, which are recounted in great detail and recalled at various stages of his life. There’s also an orgasm that even “the white whale wouldn’t have survived” overheard by guests at Little Ray’s wedding to the snowshoer, and while the narrative tracks Adam’s life, chronologically, it lingers during sexually charged political moments in history — from Roe v. Wade to President Reagan ignoring the AIDS crisis to the pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church.

Oh, and don’t forget the ghosts! The novel begins and ends with a reference to them and they play all sorts of roles in between. A real-life establishment in Aspen, Colorado, called The Hotel Jerome is haunted by various important figures in Adam’s life, many of which he features in a pair of screenplays he writes that are included in the novel, but which are based on his real life. Screenplay line spacing helps the 889 pages turn faster. It’s not that you want “The Last Chairlift” to end, exactly, but you do want to see where all the characters end up off after that final ride up the mountain.

The Last Chairlift by John Irving: a long read, not a good one

The book’s truly discomfiting aspect is the hyper-sexualisation of the female characters.

John Irving: his 15th novel, The Last Chairlift, is almost 900 pages long. Photograph; Eric Fougere/Corbis via Getty Images

The Last Chairlift, John Irving’s 15th novel, is 11 shy of 900 pages long. And boy, did I feel every one of those pages.

The Last Chairlift follows the life of Adam Brewster, born in Exeter to a ski instructor mother (a deranged, semi-incestuous nymphomaniac, although I think she was supposed to come across as “kooky”) and an (at least initially) unknown father.

Into the mix Irving pours a raft of cliched characters, including “harridan” aunts, chucklingly good-natured uncles, an inspiring, nay, saintly English teacher-cum-stepfather/mother, and huge, bossy, heart-of-gold lesbians.

Alongside these is a baffling amount of weak literary explication and juvenile political opining. All Republicans seem to be gun-toting assholes, while supposedly likable characters “scream” at CNN in rage. We’re given a summary, as well as numerous interpretations, of Moby-Dick, including what I guess to be Irving’s own take on the inclusion of the titular hyphen (a drawn-out joke on possible misinterpretations of “Dick” ensues). Dickens is quoted at length, while similarities are drawn between a character and Jane Eyre.

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The most notably shoehorned element (and there are many, including the ghosts that irritatingly scamper throughout) is the inclusion of excerpts of Adam’s film script – so unnecessary and ill-advised in this already flabby book, it’s difficult not to wonder if this might have been a rejected love-project of Irving’s. Later in the novel, Adam says that “an unmade movie never leaves you”, to which I thought, “ah, if only this one could have!”

The truly discomfiting aspect of this book, though, has to be the hyper-sexualisation of the female characters therein. Early on, a young woman’s loud orgasm is described or referenced, by my count, 16 times. Yes, Irving could argue that this is told from a teenage boy’s perspective, and thus that focusing on all things arousing is only natural. But these leering and, again, endlessly repeated descriptions, read more like the errant mental wanderings of a horny older man than the thoughts of a pubescent boy.

There is so much more I could’ve written (such as the fact that The Last Chairlift of the title is not , as one might assume, a metaphor, but an actual chairlift taken by a corpse), but thankfully, unlike Irving, I have a word count to consider.

To “The Last Chairlift”: John Irving’s Ally Fiction and the Roe Half-Century

An interview with John Irving on his new novel, "The Last Chairlift"

John Irving has declared that his new book, an irresistible and deeply affecting family saga titled The Last Chairlift , will be the last long novel of his long career. And it is, indeed, the longest. The Last Chairlift teems with the raucous situational humor, memorable and resonant characters, righteous rage, instructive social commentary, and propulsive plotting that have made his fifteen novels some of the finest fiction of the last half-century. Longtime readers will find much that’s familiar in its pages, from the Exeter, New Hampshire, setting to the single-mother-led family to the protagonist’s tragicomic sexual mishaps and the polemical bent of its queer and feminist themes.

But as Irving says in this interview, The Last Chairlift takes off from these familiar touchpoints and transports readers to places that his other novels haven’t. Irving has described the novel as a ghost story, and the writer at the center of the book, Adam Brewster, alternates between efforts to shake off the annoying presence of his grandfather’s ghost and hot pursuit of other specters who he believes will help him piece together the unsolved mystery of his family’s past.

But The Last Chairlift is also a novel very much about Adam’s family present , and the queer family that coalesces around him in adolescence and adulthood—a family in which he is the lone straight guy and (for several reasons) the unmistakable “sexual outlier.”

I spoke with Irving about this funny, angry, and enthralling new book; his persistent political themes; the trenchant commentary that has lent an unwavering sense of mission to much of his work; and the “unmade movies” in Adam Brewster’s life and Irving’s own.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Steve Nathans-Kelly

I believe The Last Chairlift is the first ghost story you’ve ever written. I saw a clip you recorded recently in which you said you hoped your friend Stephen King wouldn’t be disappointed because it wasn’t King’s kind of ghost story. Some of the ghosts in The Last Chairlift are funny, some are comforting, some are irritating and intrusive, and some may hold the key to Adam Brewster’s past. But they aren’t scary. I was interested to read that an earlier working title of the novel was the comparatively spooky Darkness as a Bride . Was there a time when The Last Chairlift was a more conventional type of ghost story? And what drove you to write about ghosts at this point in your life and career?

John Irving

For a non-religious person such as myself, ghosts have always been the only credible part of the spiritual world. I hesitated at first to call The Last Chairlift a ghost story because, as you said, it conveys a kind of genre novel that this novel isn’t. There have been ghost appearances in earlier novels: in A Prayer for Owen Meany , there was that mysterious door to the basement; and in In One Person , Grandpa Harry does not go peacefully away. But this is the first time I’ve brought them into the fore.

As for the change of title, that is a familiar pattern for me. It’s not the first time I’ve begun with a metaphorical title like Darkness as a Bride . And as you see, I kept that epigraph from what Claudio says in Measure for Measure . The quotation still applies. But in this case, I replaced a metaphorical title with what I call an “actual” title. “The Last Chairlift” is an actual chairlift. It exists; it has a function. And I also liked how late in the story it comes. You don’t discover it until the final act, so to speak. In that respect, it reminded me a lot of what happened with The Cider House Rules . For all the years I was writing Cider House , I called it The Boy Who Belonged to St. Cloud —another metaphorical title—and I replaced it with The Cider House Rules , which are actual rules. They are stupid rules, ignored rules, but they’re actual rules. And like The Last Chairlift , they come into the novel in the final act. You don’t get to them until sort of late in the story.

I’m happy when I have more than one title choice. In the same way, I’m happy when I have more than one last sentence. Knowing a last sentence for a novelist who is as ending-driven as I am is vital. I have to know what happens at the end. If I actually have a choice of last sentences, if there are two or three that might work equally as well, then I feel even more secure that my ending is on firm ground.

Speaking of matters “actual” and “metaphorical,” it seems that almost all of your books can be divided into two categories: books about actual or literal writers, and books about metaphorical writers. The metaphorical writers are those who aren’t novelists or screenwriters per se, but they use narrative to guide and reshape lives and change people’s stories to make them better. Dr. Larch was a metaphorical novelist, as was Dr. Daruwalla, and of course Owen Meany. And The Last Chairlift is an actual or literal novelist book because it has two novelists, Adam and Em, at the center of it. But you also have Adam’s mother, Little Ray, and his adoptive father, Elliot Barlow the snowshoer, guiding the narrative of Adam’s life and the way he writes. And Ray and Elliot also carefully craft their own endings. Do you believe that people who possess a mastery of narrative have a mission in the world that they’re uniquely equipped to fulfill?

Maybe that’s a function of age, but I seem to be drawn again and again to the character who is also a writer or a metaphorical writer, as you say, a character who is driven by a mission of guiding other people. The World According to Garp was always more, in truth, the world according to Jenny . It’s Garp’s mother who is driving everything that happens in the story. Everything that happens in Garp happens because of her, and we could well say the same thing about this other “writer” novel. In The Last Chairlift , everything that happens in Adam’s life is driven by his mother, Little Ray. She has sort of led him to it. You’re right to recognize that as a repeated theme or a conscious repetition.

But here’s another one: The Last Chairlift is another one of my family saga novels. And the premise is very autobiographical, but only the premise. There’s a small New England town. There’s a school, which in actuality is Exeter. I’ve given that school many different names, but in The Last Chairlift , it is Exeter by name. And there is a similarly familiar family situation, a premise that has been repeated again and again. There’s an elusive mother who’s purposely evasive about the past. There is a missing or absent biological father. There is this unknown in a family which is provoking the child of that mysterious union. But after that premise, nothing stays the same. That’s when each novel in these family equation stories is different.

What’s really different in this novel’s case is that Adam—the only straight guy in the family—is the queer one: queer in the sense of the odd duck, queer in the sense of the odd man out. Everyone else in his extended family is queer. The people who love him and take such good care of him are all queer, and they’re all much quicker and much smarter than he is. He’s the last to learn. And in terms of well behaved or not-so-well behaved, it’s unquestionable that Adam is, sexually, the most badly behaved character in his family. The straight guy is the worst guy, which is no surprise to anyone in his queer family. But I tried in this case to make the queer family the norm and Adam the outlier. I like turning that coin the other way.

In addition to being a writer and eventually a father, and trying to solve the mystery of who his ghosts are, it seems that the project of Adam Brewster’s life is understanding, protecting, and being an ally to the people in his queer family. In In One Person —another novel in which queer and transgender themes predominate—James Baldwin and Giovanni’s Room are kind of the guiding light of that book in the way that Moby-Dick is, to a certain extent, in The Last Chairlift . If I may, your relationship to this subject is different from Baldwin’s. I think of your exceptional work on queer and feminist subjects as ally fiction . Is being an effective ally something you’ve had to wrestle with in your work as Adam does in his life?

That’s a good way to put it, and I very much like the term “ally fiction.” I hope that in those novels of mine that do have a social conscience, in those novels of mine that could fairly be described as political or polemical—and by my count, that would be slightly more than half of them out of the fifteen books . . . I’m remembering something that my mother said when I was a young, as yet unknown writer with two small children of my own. And I had a younger brother and sister—boy-girl twins—who were both gay. My mom was a nurse’s aide who was working in a New Hampshire County family counseling service. And as you might imagine, in the days prior to Roe v. Wade , family counseling entailed a lot of counseling of very young, even underage women who were pregnant and faced either mandatory childbirth or an unsafe or illegal abortion. And one time, speaking of the politics of the time, largely driven by men in power who treated women as if they were sexual minorities, my mother said, “If they can treat us as if we’re sexual minorities, imagine how much worse they’re going to treat gay men and lesbian women.” That was a long time ago. That was when I was still writing The World According to Garp . And boy, how right she was. In The Last Chairlift , I’ve given that line to Little Ray. But I can’t remember how many mothers in my novels have said that, or something very similar to it.

When I was reading The Last Chairlift , I was thinking about the transgender central character in the book, Elliot Barlow, in contrast to Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp . I first encountered Roberta Muldoon on the big screen when I was thirteen years old. And I’m sorry to say that Roberta, as she appears in the movie, did nothing to dislodge my unfortunate adolescent image of trans women as comedic figures. But that image changed permanently a few months later when I read the book, because Roberta is not a comedic figure in the book. She’s Garp’s best friend. She’s Jenny’s protector. She’s the hero. And Elliot Barlow, the little transgender snowshoer, is described repeatedly as “the only hero” in The Last Chairlift . As a small-town English teacher, Elliot Barlow has a risky, but arguably quieter transition than Roberta does as a former NFL linebacker, from the far reaches of the alpha-male world. Obviously, in our time, the battle for trans citizenship and dignity is far from won, but is it different writing a trans hero in 2022 than it was in 1978?

Yes, it’s different, but as to how different, I don’t know that I can speak with authority to that. But what’s different for me is that when I was writing about Roberta, the only trans women I knew were women who came from, to use your words, an alpha-male background. Don’t forget that there wouldn’t have been a Stonewall Riot—there wouldn’t have been a fight-back—if it hadn’t been for those drag queens. They were the ones who beat the crap out of the police. They were the ones who made it a riot. That was also the alpha-male edge of the trans community. My trans daughter, Eva, wasn’t born when I wrote The World According to Garp , when I created Roberta Muldoon.

The principal reason I declined director George Roy Hill’s request for me to be the screenwriter of Garp was that we did not see eye to eye about Roberta. You used the word “comedic.” That’s exactly how George Roy Hill thought of Roberta. George was a wonderful guy and a good storyteller, but he was of that World War II generation of guys who could not imagine a trans woman character beyond her comedic properties.

The snowshoer in The Last Chairlift is called “the only hero” for actual reasons, but the snowshoer is my hero too. And I was very conscious, in the case of Elliot Barlow, of creating a trans character hero for my trans daughter, Eva.

The Last Chairlift spans several decades, from the 1940s almost up to the present day, although I don’t believe it quite reaches the time of COVID. But in the chapters set in the gay community in New York City in the 1980s, there’s much discussion of the AIDS epidemic, and the way that President Reagan looked the other way and let it happen. And there’s a moment where Adam’s cousin Nora says, “Could there ever be a plague president as bad as Reagan?” It’s hard to read that as anything but a knowing nod to Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Was that a way of saying, “We’ve been here before; don’t romanticize the past?”

Of course. It seemed to me an important time, while my fellow liberals were demonizing Trump—as Trump unquestionably deserves to be demonized—to remind them where the Moral Majority, where the Christian Right in the Republican Party, came from. It was Reagan who welcomed them into what he called “the big tent” of that party. It might have seemed to readers of the first draft of The Last Chairlift that I was conceivably being harsh or overstating the political targets in this novel: namely the Republicans and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Well, witness what the Republican justices on the Supreme Court have done. All but one of them who voted to overturn Roe are Catholic, and the one who is now Episcopalian was raised Catholic, and his mother was a staunch anti-abortion activist who worked in the Reagan administration. What those Republican justices on the court have done is more in step with the Vatican than it is with the First Amendment of the US Constitution. That part—which is repeated ad nauseam in The Last Chairlift —is “Make no laws respecting an establishment of religion.” That’s what these justices have done. So, I don’t think my targeting the Republican Party and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church is entirely wrong.

I was born in 1969, and I don’t remember a world before Roe , but now we’re living in a world after Roe . When I read The Cider House Rules in the ’80s, I thought, “Is this a reminder of darker earlier days? Or is this a premonition of what could come back?”

There were good friends of mine—feminist friends, fellow Planned Parenthood activists—who thought it was kind of quaint that I’d written “an historical novel,” as they called it, about those days when abortion was unsafe and illegal. I remember saying to some of them, “If you think Roe v. Wade is safe, you’re part of the reason it isn’t. Be careful. These anti-abortion people don’t go away.”

I read an interview you did around the time of Until I Find You where you described it as an angry novel, and said that you wanted to write that book at that time in your life, because you might not be able to write another angry novel as you got older. The Last Chairlift is clearly a funnier book than Until I Find You , but there’s a lot of pointed anger in it, particularly against people who hate others for their sexuality. Would you say you were wrong about not having another angry novel in you?

I tried to keep it funny. I had fun with making Adam a kind of stumblebum, a clueless fellow who is a slow learner to put it simply. I’m holding fast to a lesson my old teacher and mentor Kurt Vonnegut so ably demonstrated for me as a writer, but also as a person, that the harsher it’s gonna get, the funnier you better be, because you’ve gotta make people think they’re having a good time until they aren’t.

“Take It Easy”: On the Seriousness of Young Women’s Stories

You’ve said that The Last Chairlift will be your last long novel.

Of my unwritten novels, the ones that have gathered notes over how many years waiting to be the next one or the one after that—I think of those novels as boxcars in a train station, not yet coupled to an engine. And years ago, I used to choose one, not because of its length or for how many years it had sat there, waiting to be the next one, but solely on the basis of how much I knew about the ending. Last sentence is fine. Three last sentences is better. But lately, for the last three or four novels, I’ve been conscious of taking what looked like the hardest ones or the longest ones first, knowing that as I get older, it’s not going to get easier. So if I see what looks like a short train, I say, “Leave that one for when you’re tired. Take the one with the most cars. Take the one with the largest passage of time and the largest number of interconnected characters over a passage of time. That’s gonna be long.”

The other factor that makes the writing of a novel long is how much research you have to do, because there’s something in the novel that is completely outside your life experience and you’re gonna have to go learn something. There was no element of that kind in The Last Chairlift . I’ve grown up around skiing. I’ve lived in ski towns. One of my children is the director of a ski patrol in Colorado. I have two grandchildren on the US ski team. I knew this would not present to me any research difficulties. There was nothing outside my own experience I had to learn, and I had plenty of first readers I could turn to. It wasn’t like Until I Find You or A Widow for One Year , where I was gonna have to go and live in Amsterdam for months, or familiarize myself with those tattoo shops in the Baltic and all around the North Sea. There was nothing of that kind of obstacle. Or in the case of Cider House , how much time I had to spend at the Yale Medical Historical Library, or how much time I had to spend observing obstetrical and gynecological procedures to try and get a grasp of the OB/GYN world as it used to be. That was tough.

There are a few times in The Last Chairlift where you talk about unfinished or unpublished work as “unmade movies” that, as a writer, stay with you forever. Do you still have unmade movies in your life?

Well, I think this is a truth of every screenwriter’s life. No matter how successful you are, you’re gonna write more screenplays than are going to be made. You can’t be a screenwriter—even an Oscar-winning screenwriter—and not live with the fact of the movies that don’t get made. They add up over time, and as long as they’re not made, there’s an instinct to keep returning to them, to keep fiddling with them as if anything could be or should be done. I’m lucky that my day job is writing novels, because in my case, I’ve actually put to use several screenplays that weren’t made. I’ve turned them into novels. A Son of the Circus was an unmade movie. Martin Bell, the director, and I could not get that film made in India. Then we went to Mexico and tried to get it made in Mexico. That became the novel Avenue of Mysteries . So I’ve had an outlet for my unmade movies. Not every screenwriter has that option.

Here’s a part of what I mean. I went to work for two years in Vienna to try to make a movie [of my first novel, Setting Free the Bears ] with director Irvin Kershner, who is probably best known for The Empire Strikes Back . He was a great guy. He taught me how to write a screenplay. We worked on that screenplay together for Columbia Pictures in the UK, and they pulled the plug after two years. I was devastated, but I’d had a lot of fun learning how to do something new. Kershner said, “Don’t worry kid. You’ll learn something you can use.”

Years later, after declining to write the movies of The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire , the collaboration with Lasse Halström on Cider House was really good. We took it to four film festivals, and at the fourth, the Toronto International Film Festival, I was up in one of the upper balconies at Roy Thomson Hall, and suddenly there was this older man with white hair and white beard, who looked a little bit like Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future . He said, “I told you you’d learn something, kid.” It was Kershner.

I think a lot of the made and unmade feelings about movies go back to that, because the great irony in my life as a screenwriter is that Kershner is the man I credit one hundred percent with teaching me the form and how to do it, and the two years we spent working on nothing but Setting Free the Bears came to naught. But they did not come to naught, because something you learn can always be put to other use.

And with that in mind, I started The Last Chairlift in 2016. In the previous year I’d written five scripts for the teleplay of the Warner Bros. TV adaptation of The World According to Garp , and handed them off to the head writer. But I knew when I started Chairlift that I was done writing scripts for television or for film. In the time remaining to me, I only want to write novels.

And now you’ve written a novel about a screenwriter.

Yes, and an important part of The Last Chairlift near the end was a big, feature-length film [written as a screenplay]. If the “Loge Peak” chapter had been written as prose fiction, it would’ve been three times as long, but I knew I had to demonstrate that Adam knows how to do it. Furthermore, there’s a twist, as you know. Not only did I need to create what I was talking about—an unmade movie that doesn’t go away—but I also had to create all the very good reasons why it never should have been made. Why it never could be made. So I was conscious of not only writing an unmade movie, but of creating the circumstances for a hundred good reasons why. And that was fun.

But a part of the fun—and I think you can hear it in my voice—a part of the fun was the kind of goodbye. I put a lot into that “Loge Peak” chapter because I thought, “Well, do it right, ’cause this is the last time you’re gonna do this. This is the last time you’re gonna play this trick.”

FICTION The Last Chairlift By John Irving Simon & Schuster Published October 18, 2022

Steve Nathans-Kelly is a writer and magazine and book editor based in Ithaca, New York. His work has appeared in New York Journal of Books, Paste Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, First of the Month, Virtual Ireland, and First Look Books.

Having had the privilege to get to know John Irving in my youth, his books and screen plays are great but the man himself is an even greater hero than the reader will know.

Thank you for this excellent interview as it shed light on a very important time in my life for which I will forever be grateful to John Irving!

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The Last Chairlift Kindle Edition

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ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09RX3123G
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (October 18, 2022)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 18, 2022
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3383 KB
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John Irving published his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, in 1968. He has been nominated for a National Book Award three times-winning once, in 1980, for the novel The World According to Garp. He also received an O. Henry Award, in 1981, for the short story "Interior Space." In 1992, Mr. Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules-a film with seven Academy Award nominations. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

For more information about the author, please visit www.john-irving.com

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The Last Chairlift

By John Irving
Simon & Schuster
Reviewed by Chris Rutledge
November 29, 2022

A disjointed, disappointing tale from an otherwise brilliant novelist.

John Irving is an American treasure. The World According to Garp , The Cider House Rules , and A Prayer for Owen Meany are classics of modern literature. Which is why it’s such a tragedy that his latest novel, The Last Chairlift , simply does not live up to his other work.

Irving has stated that this is his final long novel. If that’s the case, he appears to be going for word count to make his swansong memorable. Topping out at over 900 pages, The Last Chairlift would be a slog even if you weren’t already familiar with many of the tropes it employs.

The narrative spans the 20th century, the American landscape, and a host of what Irving in the past would have called “sexual outlaws.” The novel centers on Adam, his mother, her husband (a beloved mentor to Adam), and his mother’s lesbian partner, as well as on Adam’s cousin and her partner (who later becomes his wife).

There’s not much to say about the book’s plot, unfortunately, because it doesn’t have one. Worse, Irving so often repeats themes from his earlier books that it borders on self-plagiarism. If you’ve read anything by him before, you’ve read this book. Certainly, authors are free to revisit subjects and frequently do, but in The Last Chairlift , Irving returns to such specific plot points from The World According to Garp that you wonder if he’s simply rewriting old material.

The list is long. Do you want to read about a mother who impregnates herself via someone who cannot consent to sex? In Garp , the future baby’s father is a comatose soldier. Here, it’s a 14-year-old boy. Would you like to meet young women who voluntarily mute themselves to protest sexual violence? In Garp , you have the Ellen Jamesians. In The Last Chairlift , you get a pantomime artist (do such performers even exist?) named Emily.

Or do you feel like encountering a transgender former athlete who becomes a beloved parental figure? Here, Garp ’s retired football player Roberta Muldoon is repackaged as wrestler Elliot Barlow (who remains “Mr.” Barlow post-transition for reasons unexplained).

You can’t help but experience déjà vu as you move from page to page, yet this is far from the only weakness in the book. Throughout, things just...happen. Sometimes they are connected to prior occurrences, but often not. And once you’ve moved past one chapter, more stuff just…happens, again without any real connection to what came before. It all leads to a sense of disjointedness for the reader.

If you’re worried you won’t keep all the characters straight, don’t be. Irving obsessively states their ages and professions every few pages, if not their names. Mr. Barlow is more frequently referred to as “the snowshoer” (his hobby) and Adam’s mother’s partner as “the night groomer” (her job) than their actual monikers. I suppose this is intended to help the reader follow along as characters jump from place to place, but it comes across as a bit off.

Oh, did I mention the ghosts? Yes, there’s also a ghost story unfolding here, although its value is unclear.

For all his lack of a theme, Irving, long an advocate of sexual and political open-mindedness, works into the narrative numerous polemics largely directed at Ronald Reagan. You’d think this might constitute a theme of sorts. You’d be wrong.

To be fair, The Last Chairlift isn’t all bad. If you’re a fan of Classic John Irving, many of the novel’s quirky characters will feel like old friends. And you do come to pull for them, if only because you’ve spent so much time together. Like relatives and party guests who just won’t leave, they work their way into your heart, at least a little. And if you, like this reviewer, share Irving’s liberal politics — particularly around sexual expression — you’ll have your worldview validated.

The Last Chairlift may be Irving’s final long work, but one can hope other, shorter pieces are forthcoming. The author’s talent and legacy are too great for this to be the send-off he leaves us with.

Chris Rutledge is a husband, father, writer, nonprofit professional, and community member living in Silver Spring, MD. Besides the Independent, his work has appeared in Kirkus Reviews, American Book Review, and countless intemperate Facebook posts, which will surely get him into trouble one day.

Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Powell's.com Or through Bookshop.org

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John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears , was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven. He is a member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 1980, Mr. Irving won a National Book Award for his novel The World According to Garp . In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules . In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for his novel In One Person . Internationally renowned, his novels have been translated into almost forty languages. His all-time bestselling novel, in every language, is A Prayer for Owen Meany . A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, John Irving lives in Toronto.

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Publisher: Simon & Schuster (October 3, 2023)
Length: 912 pages
ISBN13: 9781501189289

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'The Last Chairlift' Review: An Unconventional Family Epic
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Book Review: ‘The Last Chairlift’ by John Irving
THE LAST CHAIRLIFT
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Book Review: ‘The Last Chairlift’ by John Irving

COMMENTS

Book Review: 'The Last Chairlift' by John Irving
At 900 pages, "The Last Chairlift," his 15th novel, is an overstuffed family saga about a screenwriter very much like the author himself. THE LAST CHAIRLIFT, by John Irving. An awful lot ...
The Last Chairlift by John Irving review
Irving has been compared to Dickens, but on the evidence of this novel that is far-fetched. He has little of Dickens's sophisticated and multivalent command of register, and only a fraction of ...
The Last Chairlift by John Irving
John Irving, one of the world's greatest novelists, returns with his first novel in seven years—a ghost story, a love story, and a lifetime of sexual politics. In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but ...
Review
7 min. 38. At 889 pages, John Irving's new novel, " The Last Chairlift ," is an imposing brick of paper. This is, in every way, Irving cubed. I have no objection to long books. My favorite ...
THE LAST CHAIRLIFT
THE LAST CHAIRLIFT. A book that will try a reader's patience but may also reward it. Familiar Irving themes and autobiographical points mark this sprawling family tale. Narrator Adam Brewster is a lucky bastard. His short and unwed mother, Ray, is gay but marries even shorter Elliot, an English teacher and wrestler at Adam's New Hampshire ...
Review: John Irving writes long tale 'The Last Chairlift'
By ROB MERRILL, Associated Press. October 25, 2022. "The Last Chairlift" by John Irving (Simon & Schuster) After 54 years and 15 novels, John Irving's finally done it. He's written a book ...
'The Last Chairlift' Review: An Unconventional Family Epic
The Last Chairlift ultimately turns out to be about autobiographical fiction as much as an example of it. Some 200 pages are given over to Adam's unproduced screenplay based on a trip he makes to Aspen, where he was conceived. Much like the second half of 1998's A Widow for One Year, which transforms a coming-of-age story into a detective yarn, the insertion of a feature-length film script ...
Review: 'The Last Chairlift,' by John Irving
FICTION: John Irving, 80, returns with an epic novel exploring — and recycling — some of his favorite themes. John Irving's 15th novel, "The Last Chairlift," is hard to miss: At more than 900 ...
Book review of The Last Chairlift by John Irving
Review by Harvey Freedenberg. With John Irving celebrating his 80th birthday earlier this year, his publisher has announced that The Last Chairlift will be his last big novel. For all the enjoyment more modest works may bring, this one is a fitting valediction to his distinguished literary career.
Review: The Last Chairlift
The last chairlift. Chairlifts are a place of death throughout this novel, one tragic and others where the last chairlift marks a fitting coda on the lives of those brought down the mountain for the last time. One wonders if Irving sees this story as a coda, a last chairlift in his life.
The Last Chairlift
by John Irving. Publication Date: October 3, 2023. Genres: Fiction. Paperback: 912 pages. Publisher: Simon & Schuster. ISBN-10: 150118928X. ISBN-13: 9781501189289. In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but ...
Review: John Irving writes long tale 'The Last Chairlift'
Published 7:13 AM PDT, October 17, 2022. "The Last Chairlift" by John Irving (Simon & Schuster) After 54 years and 15 novels, John Irving's finally done it. He's written a book longer than most editions of "Moby-Dick.". And by the time you're done reading it, you'll chuckle every time you see the hyphen in Melville's title.
Review: In 'The Last Chairlift' John Irving traces sloppy life of his
THE LAST CHAIRLIFT.By John Irving. Simon & Schuster. 912 pages. $38. After 54 years and 15 novels, John Irving's finally done it. He's written a book longer than most editions of "Moby-Dick."
The Last Chairlift by John Irving
THE LAST CHAIRLIFT. 889pp. Scribner. £25. Reading a very long, very boring novel - in the instance, that is, that you are professionally obliged to see it through to the end - has a lot in common with the grieving process. First the denial that the flat prose and plotlessness of the opening chapters could possibly be sustained over 889 pages.
Heavy Lifting and Familiar Themes in John Irving's "The Last Chairlift
ALL IN THE FAMILY. Family matters. Big-time in Irving's work. There's often a quest to find a key missing parent, like the father in Until I Find You and again here in The Last Chairlift. Those searches are always aided - if not stymied - by strong mothers. In the most recent case, it's Rachel, a former world-class-wannabe skier whose ...
Book Marks reviews of The Last Chairlift by John Irving
The Last Chairlift is eminently readable, stocked with characters and relationships easy to invest in, even when things get a little queasy making. Irving has been cranking out novels for 54 years, establishing a consistent generosity of spirit that continues through his most recent book. If anyone has earned the right to deliver one more ...
The Last Chairlift by John Irving: a long read, not a good one
The Last Chairlift, John Irving's 15th novel, is 11 shy of 900 pages long. And boy, did I feel every one of those pages. The Last Chairlift follows the life of Adam Brewster, born in Exeter to a ...
The Last Chairlift
The Last Chairlift. John Irving. Scribner UK, Oct 18, 2022 - Fiction - 400 pages. John Irving, one of the world's greatest novelists, returns with his first novel in seven years — a ghost story, a love story, and a lifetime of sexual politics. In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom ...
To "The Last Chairlift": John Irving's Ally Fiction and the Roe Half
John Irving has declared that his new book, an irresistible and deeply affecting family saga titled The Last Chairlift, will be the last long novel of his long career. And it is, indeed, the longest. The Last Chairlift teems with the raucous situational humor, memorable and resonant characters, righteous rage, instructive social commentary, and propulsive plotting that have made his fifteen ...
The Last Chairlift Kindle Edition
The Last Chairlift - Kindle edition by Irving, John. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading The Last Chairlift. ... (Books) Customer Reviews: 3.9 out of 5 stars 3,118. Brief content visible, double tap to read full content. Full content ...
The Last Chairlift
Topping out at over 900 pages, The Last Chairlift would be a slog even if you weren't already familiar with many of the tropes it employs. The narrative spans the 20th century, the American landscape, and a host of what Irving in the past would have called "sexual outlaws.". The novel centers on Adam, his mother, her husband (a beloved ...
All Book Marks reviews for The Last Chairlift by John Irving
The Last Chairlift is eminently readable, stocked with characters and relationships easy to invest in, even when things get a little queasy making. Irving has been cranking out novels for 54 years, establishing a consistent generosity of spirit that continues through his most recent book.
The Last Chairlift
John Irving's fifteenth novel is "powerfully cinematic" (The Washington Post) and "eminently readable" (The Boston Globe).The Last Chairlift is part ghost story, part love story, spanning eight decades of sexual politics. In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships.
Book review: A Calamity of Souls by David Baldacci
The Ministry of Justice has just closed submissions on the draft code - which would be voluntary.The previous Labour government began a review of the lobbying sector last year, and revoked most lobbyists' swipe card access to parliament. It also instigated the development of a non-binding code of conduct for the industry.
Best Lift Chairs For Seniors In 2024
According to Rhoades, there are three main types of lift chairs: Two-position. The most basic option, this lift chair reclines to a 45-degree angle, allowing the person seated to lean back slightly.

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