John Irving is about as lofty as it gets when we think of modern American novelists. Lauded for The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules and The Hotel New Hampshire, Irving has penned 15 novels and scads of other writings including screenplays during a career that spans over five decades. Not all of his work has been celebrated and some of it is borderline impenetrable. A Son of the Circus anyone? That novel goes well with tea and chocolate and was the most recent Irving I had read before tackling The Last Chairlift. I say tea and chocolate because A Son of the Circus is such a mess of a novel, that a reader requires sustenance throughout. Chocolate necessity. There is much the same sensation with The Last Chairlift although there is far less excitement in this latest (2022) work.

The Last Chairlift is the story of Adam Brewster who’s mother is a ski instructor. Little Ray lives away from her son for six months of the year, while she’s working and living at a ski resort with her partner, Molly. Adam’s grandmother, who reads him Moby-Dick (all of it), takes care of him when Little Ray’s not around. Adam grows up missing his mother when she’s away and being doted on by her whenever she’s around. They are in love from the start. Adam’s close to his cousin Nora and her girlfriend Em who are some six years older than Adam. When Adam is around 14, Little Ray marries an English teacher, Elliot Barlow. A snowshoeing enthusiast and cross dresser Adam has met and introduced Mr Barlow to his mother. At their wedding in Little Ray’s and Adam’s childhood home Adam’s grandfather standing naked in the rain is killed by a lightening strike. He haunts the house. There are other ghosts, mostly from the Hotel Jerome in Aspen Colorado where Adam was conceived, but this isn’t a proper ghost story. The ghosts might be metaphorical ones. Little Ray doesn’t share Adam’s paternity details with him or anyone else. The boy’s got a mildly obsessive interest in his father’s identity; it gets more persistent as Adam gets older. All the other loving and supportive members of his family want to know too, but no one really sweats it. The truth comes out eventually and doesn’t really matter that much. What matters is that Adam is deeply loved by a collection of wonderful people who enrich his life story and sense of personal affirmation.

Over the course of 889 densely typeset pages we share in the evolving relationships of these closely bonded characters, plus a mass of other mostly uninteresting ones. There are just too many people in The Last Chairlift to keep caring about, or to try to keep in mind in case they pop up again around about page 765 or wherever. Popping up again is what you expect but what often doesn’t happen. This is why chocolate has to be close to hand. Consolation or distraction. Most of the extra characters are props for a lazy rather than meticulous plotline, or they’re convenient devices to drive the plot along. Most never reappear. It’s in part why this novel feels so baggy, unedited, random. Add in the fitness, obsessions with smallness, the mock screenplays, the ghosts with so much volition and personality, the wrestling and Moby-Dickreferences; it’s an exhausting mess.

Or it’s a life that we’re participating in; the unsketched reader’s just another of the outcasts Irving celebrates in these and other pages. The Last Chairlift celebrates its outcasts as sexual variables, yet we get no insight as to what makes people want to do what they want to do to each other. Nor do we learn more about how they decide who it is that turns them on, or who they would like to turn on. Is any of it a decision? So far so normal. For bog standard heterosexuals this is a constant conundrum within and beyond their own tribe. It’s probably the same for the nonbogstandard ones too, as well as the rest. Independent of tribe, what’s the intangible we all miss? Why isn’t it enough that to love is enough? What conflates peoples’ sexuality and sense of identity? The Last Chairlift offers no hints or revelations, apart from the love thing. “There are more ways of loving.” It’s fine to parade a cohort of alternatives, but is it fine for an author to offer no interiority for his or her characters? In 350,000 words, there surely should be room for more nuance and expression of persona.

It’s safe to say that if this book had landed on a publisher’s desk without the John Irving moniker it would have been unceremoniously rejected. At over 350,000 words there are far too many of them used to tell the basic story of Little Ray and Adam and their loved ones. The text is well bogged down with repetitions, reminders, cop-outs and the use of screenplay formatting, a complex clutter of what is essentially a lazy and unfocused narrative. But maybe that’s deliberate. One of the repetitions throughout this novel is that fiction is tidy, but that life’s storylines are messy. Irving’s way of presenting this may be more dumpling than soufflé but the point is clear. One way to consider this novel is as roughly autobiographical; it includes all the usual Irving tropes: an abundance of semicolons, writing chat, politics, wrestling, personal alienation, relationship overdosing, films and movie stars, New Hampshire and New York City, sexual awakening, sexual minority, sexual expression, sexual dysfunction and überfunctioning, sex in whatever manner you fancy. As the novel grinds interminably on, sex as Irving’s obsession dribbles ever slower, ever more passively. Perhaps this is what happens to men, or this man, slipping into a ninth decade. Other things become more important, like how we care for each other and all the other ways there are to love. And where I left my slippers. 

This book is easy to judge based on its plot (check) and characters (too many, but check), but less easy to consider based on what it is about. It isn’t really about what it says on the back cover: those two paragraphs cover incidences in the book, But those incidents are among many and although they might be triggers for wider themes, those events aren’t important. There’s just so much going on in this novel, but mostly it’s about John Irving. If you’re a John Irving fan get stuck in and wallow with him a (long) while. If not read Moby-Dick instead.