The Last Chairlift: John Irving's Farewell

 

 

THE LAST CHAIRLIFT (2022)

By John Irving

Simon & Schuster, 889 pages

★★★★

 

John Irving insists that The Last Chairlift, his 15th novel, will be his last. I have mixed feelings. Few writers have given me as much pleasure, but it’s objectively true that he recycles. A bear is one of few props he doesn’t reprise in The Last Chairlift. It is set in familiar places: New Hampshire, Vermont, Toronto, and (indirectly) Austria. You will also find Phillips Exeter Academy and wrestling, both Irving standards.

 

You need not have read previous works to enjoy Last Chairlift, but if you’re pondering how Irving gets away with repeated tropes, it’s because he’s a spellbinding storyteller rightly mentioned in the same breath as Dickens and Hawthorne. Irving did not know his father and neither does Adam Brewster, the son of ski instructor and former competitor Rachel, known as Ray or “Little” Ray, the latter why she never finished close to the podium in races. Little people are omnipresent: Ray, Adam, and 4'9” Phillips Exeter English instructor Elliot Barlow, whom Ray impulsively weds. All are spin-offs from Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany.

 

The Brewsters are an odd family. Ray has two older sisters, Abigail and Martha, for whom the term harridan applies. Luckily their respective husbands Martin and Johan are guffawing good-time boys with the sense not to pay serious attention to them. The putative head of the Brewster clan is Lewis—his wife actually orchestrated matters—was said to have headed Phillips Exeter. He’s now mute and in such a diminished state he is nicknamed “diaper man.” The Brewsters, including Abigail's lesbian daughter Nora, also see ghosts. Last Chairlift is indeed partly a ghost novel, one linked to Aspen's Hotel Jerome. It also has numerous gay and transgender characters, themes Irving explored in works such as The World According to Garp and In One Person.

 

Quirkiness abounds. Adam sleeps with his mother long after the age in which that's socially acceptable. Like Jenny in Garp, Ray is a protective mother not an incestuous predator. Her marriage notwithstanding, Ray is in a long-term relationship with ski patroller Molly–who is analogous to Roberta in Garp–and both Adam and Elliot are fine with that. Elliot loves Dickens (!), shares Adam’s disdain for skiing, and is dubbed “the snowshoer.” He instructs Adam in that art and is also a wrestling coach. That sounds absurd, but Elliot has hands so strong he can disable bullies many times his size. Adam views him as the best “dad” he could ever have, one who encourages him to become a writer. (Writer main characters are found in many Irving novels, from early works like Garp through A Widow for One Year and Twisted River.)

 

Unusual characters proliferate in Last Chairlift: crossdressers, a psychotic wannabe Marine, a B-movie actor who becomes A-list, Nora's miming girlfriend and comedy partner Em, a paraplegic former ski champ, fanatics similar to the Ellen Jamesians in Garp, and a string of Adam’s inappropriate girlfriends with nicknames like “the strong one on crutches,” “the tall one with her arm in a cast,” and “the bleeder.”

 

Even death is unorthodox, as we see in the demise of Lewis Brewster, Adam's uncles, the actor's wife, Elliot’s parents, and others. Of course, in a ghost novel, not all of them disappear. The Hotel Jerome has many, including miners from an old photograph, a cowboy, and a Mexican-born woman who once lived there.

 

Finding one’s identity and voice, literally and figuratively, is another theme in Last Chairlift. In a roundabout way, it’s also the story of Adam’s voice as he grows up, marries badly, becomes a father, finds his soulmate in a truly odd relationship, and moves to Toronto. Happy endings aren’t Irving’s forte, so let's call it compromised contentment.

 

It depends on your perspective whether you call The Last Chairlift masterful, self-plagiarizing, creative autobiography, or a big mess. It runs 889 pages and I can't in good conscience say it needs to be that long. There is a lot of repetition, sometimes using exactly the same language. Several of Adam’s screenplays appear within the novel. They link to the narrative, but are limp enough to be called filler. The book could use a stiff edit, but a writer of Irving's stature can call his shots. Does the novel need to be as scatological as it is? Does it need to have such twisted views of sex? Are digs at reviewers and interviewers gratuitous?

 

These are again individual calls. John Irving has given me enough reading pleasure that I'll call The Last Chairlift the culmination of his career. Should he find another novel in him, though, he needs to ski (a theme first broached in The Water-Method Man) ungroomed trails.

 

 

Rob Weir