The Last Chairlift

[Zee Petty]

That's probably overly dramatic. There's plenty to like here. It's one of those novels you'll read five pages and wonder why you're reading this or ever liked John Irving or like reading at all, and then he'll drop some wisdom or a plot twist or a perfect sentence and you realize why you love all those things.

The Last Chairlift covers 80 years in the life of one Adam Brewster, a New England writer who grows up with a lesbian mother, a trans stepfather, and is surrounded by a cast of characters that let's just say wouldn't exactly be welcomed at a Waffle House in a red state. They're a fascinating group, to say the least.

In an interview with Seth Meyers not long after the book was published, Irving explained why it was important to make Adam, the straight, white male character, the outsider in this group of characters. "It was certainly my intention to make him the odd guy out, to make him the 'queer' member of the family -- queer in the sense of strange and not up to speed." I loved that! Good fiction turns norms on their head.

As with many of Irving's novels, he repeats a single phrase over and over throughout a novel to really drive home a theme. Here, Adam, who is telling this story in the first-person, tells us often the best advice he ever received, and the best lesson he ever learned: "There's more than one way to love people."

In total, the novel is a career retrospective for Irving, who has said this will be his last "long" novel. There's wrestling and uncomfortable situations with young men and much older women and progressive politics and lots of writers and yes, ghosts.

When I finished the book, I texted my friend again "FINISHED!" She asked if it was worth it, and I had to think about that a minute. Yes, it's definitely always worth it to finish a novel, I responded. This one tested me for sure. But ultimately, yes, it was worth it. It did hurt at times, but also like a marathon, I knew I was signing up for pain when I started this, and finishing it did feel like an accomplishment!

I've read nearly every word Irving has written, and I'd put this one in the bottom of the middle-third of his work. It's definitely better than Avenue of Mysteries and Until I Find You, but nowhere near Garp or Owen Meany.

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.

The opening sentence of John Irving's breakout novel, The World According to Garp, signals the start of sexual violence, which becomes increasingly political. "Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater." Jenny is an unmarried nurse; she becomes a single mom and a feminist leader, beloved but polarizing. Her son, Garp, is less beloved, but no less polarizing.

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.

International number-one best seller Ken Follett returns with The Evening and the Morning, a thrilling and addictive novel from the master of historical fiction. It is 997 CE, the end of the Dark Ages, and in England one man's ambition to make his abbey a centre of learning will take the listener on an epic journey into a historical past rich with ambition and rivalry, death and birth, love and hate. Thirty years ago, Ken Follett published his most popular novel, The Pillars of the Earth, which has sold more than 27 million copies worldwide.

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the gritty '90s Chicago art scene, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in the thriving underground scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to suburban married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter the often-baffling pursuits of health and happiness from polyamorous would-be suitors to home-renovation hysteria.

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car.

John Irving is a writer who has historically been fearless in his focus. The American-born Irving's first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968 at the age of 26. His books have been translated into more than 35 languages. While known as a novelist, he's been an Hall of Fame wrestling coach, an English professor and an Oscar-winning screenwriter.

Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of the 1978 novel The World According to Garp. His other work includes The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany and Avenue of Mysteries.

But he still is motivated to write. Now a dual citizen of the United States and Canada, the Toronto-based Irving is back with The Last Chairlift, an epic novel about family, identity and the ghosts that haunt us all. It's about an American slalom skier who leaves that life behind after becoming pregnant with her son Adam during a competition in Colorado. Years later, Adam returns to the Aspen hotel where he was conceived to learn more about his past and identity.

That character, and many characters in your books, have a deep social and political conscience. How do you see tolerance and social mores evolving over the years in literature and the real world?

When I wrote The World According to Garp, a novel about of the days when abortion used to be illegal, I had friends who told me that it was a nice historical novel but it's over now [due to Roe v. Wade]. I said I didn't write this novel because I believe it will never be over. I wanted to demonstrate this is what it's like when you take a woman's right to this away.

Most Americans don't know their own country's history of abortion. They don't know that abortion was, from the earliest days of Plymouth, Mass., in the 1620s. They don't realize that for more than two centuries abortion was legal and available through the first trimester, before they took it away.

Speaking of The Last Chairlift, it is set in America, in Colorado. But you live in Canada now. Years ago, you mentioned in an interview that, as an American writer, you weren't sure you would be as in touch with your subject if you lived somewhere else. But now you do live somewhere else. How are you staying rooted in the context of writing this story set in America, living in Canada now?

My decision to come to Canada is entirely because my wife is Canadian. My becoming a Canadian citizen isn't a political statement. It's a love story. I even felt lucky in the Canadian immigration process [to be a dual citizen]. There were a lot of people going through that process with me who would not have it as easy a time as I did. That was a learning experience too. I was really glad to have it.

I think political guilt has always worked very constructively with me. My Vietnam novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, was written in part because of how both how unwitting and how lucky I was to evade the moral decision that so many of my fellow Americans had to make about that war.

Well, I was so naive I felt disappointed. I didn't even know I was lucky. Later, when many of the boys I'd gone to school with had died in Vietnam, I felt guilty for having dodged that bullet. I was young enough and out of it enough to think that an opportunity for me as a writer was lost, not having the opportunity to see a war.

In the area of my novels that could probably most broadly be described as family sagas, and surely The Last Chairlift is in that. There are many beginnings to these stories that have a similar autobiographical framework.

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