Irvingworld evokes nostalgia for a time when novel writing felt more powerful — even when novelists were celebrities, it was like a sport Fool it on a talk showBut this sustained stay can feel like an unrelenting avalanche of words that appear in a blink of an eye.
Irving has long maimed and killed his characters in shocking and unlikely ways. And the rapid spilling of blood from “The Last Chairlift” is probably because Adam took him, along with his young son and his hostile wife, to a historic and spooky Colorado hotel. An unsettling feeling that he’s duetting with another middlebrow master, Stephen King.
Adam will see his relatives struck by lightning. Trapped under a derailed train. Shot at a comedy club called the Gallows Lounge. Drive off the road in your truck while listening to the song “No Lucky Star” sung by performers from the gallows.
The Brewsters are a peculiar bunch, perpetually procrastinating over bedding arrangements and venting their grievances to Little Ray’s sisters. (“Unkind critics complain about how I dispatch or dispose of aunts I hate in my fiction, but these critics didn’t know Aunt Abigail or Aunt Martha.” Adam writes.) As in the “Friends” episode, his girlfriends are given nicknames. They bleed from fibroids, roll headfirst down the stairs, and lose bowel control in his bed. “Your vagina ballroom,” Little Ray sneers at his son’s older boyfriend on the phone.
Irving will be playing Adam’s stand-up gig on the gallows called “Two Dykes, One Who Talks” with teeny schoolteacher Elliot Barlow, who becomes Adam’s stepfather, and her pantomime girlfriend Em. Most kind to my cousin Nora. Instead of talking. The only thing you hear from Em’s mouth in the first part of the book is a sustained orgasm so loud that the waitress drops trays, spills jugs, and kneels. “I had never heard anything like it, even in foreign films with subtitles,” Adam writes. He still talks about this impressive climax on page 866.
Irving has been a longtime advocate of queerness in his novels, even if “queer” here is only used in its old, pejorative and unclaimed sense. Little Her Ray’s main squeeze turned out to be a trail groomer named Molly (often simply called “trail groomer”). Elliot (“Snowshoe”) eventually undergoes a gender transition. This change triggers Adam’s affection and protection. “He’s not the one way to love a man, Kid,” Molly tells him in one of her occasional articles in this book. Ohamber armpits.
When the air is clear and the terrain smooth, “The Last Chairlift” has patches of preachy, provocative vulgarity, and delightful stretches. But unless you’re an avid Irving fan and crave a cursory summary, you might find yourself overwhelmed by the volume of this novel.
last chair lift John Irving | | Page 912 | Simon & Schuster | $38