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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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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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clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

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.

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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’ review: John Irving’s epic family saga

Book review.

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 nonverbal woman, a transgender 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. Sometimes it involves more conventional matters of infidelity.

6 p.m. Oct. 26; Seattle Arts & Lectures online; $10-$138; lectures.org/event/john-irving .

But Irving is also seriously targeting six or so decades’ worth of sexual suppression and demonization. The story’s key moments involve homophobia and transphobia, the Reagan administration’s willful neglect of the AIDS crisis, and religious hypocrisy. In every era, being outspoken against those forces makes characters a target. A fair amount of blood is shed across the novel’s pages.

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.

John Irving, Simon & Schuster, 912 pp., $38

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