The Last Chairlift Review: John Irving’s Unconventional Family Epic

John Irving has said that The Last Chairlift will be his last long novel. Since his fourth novel, The World According to Garp, was published in 1978 to significant acclaim, he’s specialized in telling expansive stories, often tracing characters’ journeys from birth to death and chronicling the histories of the places in which they live. Irving’s shortest novel in the last 25 years, The Fourth Hand, was a deliberate attempt on his part to write an accessible comedy. It was also dull and thinly conceived, devoid of the immersive quality that makes most of his work so compelling. This isn’t to say that the 80-year-old writer won’t go on to publish some wonderful novels of modest length, but it’s hard not to read The Last Chairlift, with its elegiac tone and sprawling time horizon, as a final, all-encompassing summary of Irving’s concerns and obsessions.

Then again, Irving’s novels have seemed like “greatest hits” collections for years now. Sometimes lazily and sometimes transformatively, he’s reconfigured his favorite plot elements, settings, and autobiographical details into works that will feel comfortingly familiar to some and stale to others. Rainer Werner Fassbinder once remarked that every great director has only one subject, and ultimately makes the same film over and over again. Irving, working primarily as a novelist and sometimes as a screenwriter, seems to have taken this idea literally.

The Last Charlift is about a man who’s born in the mid-20th century to a single mother in New England. He attends an elite boarding school, joins the wrestling team, and grows up to be a writer. Already, you’re sure you’ve heard this one before, and that’s without mentioning that one of the main characters is a transgender woman, or that the story involves the murder of a feminist activist by a male bigot with a rifle, or the protagonist’s stint in a German-speaking country. An Irving loyalist can play “I Spy” throughout all 900 pages of The Last Charlift, but that broad outline above doesn’t begin to capture what makes the novel distinctive.

Typical of an Irving protagonist, Adam Brewster—who narrates the book in the first person—is more of an observer of his unconventional family life than he is an active participant in the story. We’ve seen this get Irving into trouble before, as he tends to write absorbing openings and poignant endings but struggles to hold our attention in the middle stretch. But, to take one example, The Cider House Rules, mired in hundreds of pages of passive “waiting and seeing,” finds Homer Wells making two crucial decisions, the second effectively a reversal of the first. Homer changes by the end of Irving’s heartfelt and morally magnificent masterpiece, and the reader can see it happening over more than a decade of story time.

Adam Brewster, though, seems to take everything in stride, even major revelations about members of his family. There are moments when we learn that he’s been crying, which would otherwise be unapparent from the uninflected prose. It isn’t that Adam is cold or unfeeling; rather, his role, as a stand-in for Irving, is to tell the stories of the people in his life and to chronicle the progress and regression of sexual politics in America over the course of his life. We spend the novel looking outward through his eyes, not exploring the depths of his soul.

But Irving isn’t Anthony Powell and Adam is no Nick Jenkins: The Last Chairlift is less insightful on Irving’s major political subject, sexual intolerance, than it is about the peculiar personalities of all the other major characters. This is where the aforementioned tropes distinguish themselves from their precedents. The details matter. Adam’s mother, called Little Ray, is a free-spirited Bennington College dropout who spends six months of the year as a ski instructor in Vermont, leaving Adam in the care of his grandmother, a lettered woman who reads him Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and grandfather, a former Exeter faculty member who became mute upon learning the circumstances of his grandson’s conception. Despite Ray’s absence for half the year, she’s an attentive and loving mother.

There are non-avocational reasons for her time away that come to light in due course, but mystery hangs over much of the novel’s first act, especially concerning Adam’s father. Adam is told that Ray is a “one-event girl,” which he understands to mean at least three things: that she’s strictly a slalom skier; that, like her two older sisters, she has only one child; and that she may in fact have had sex only one time (i.e., when Adam was conceived). Ray herself refers to Adam as her “one and only,” and later on as the love of her life. This is The Last Chairlift’s central relationship, and it’s so effectively rendered that the reader doesn’t stumble over what would in less gentle hands be uncomfortable intimacies, such as Ray and Adam’s habit of sleeping in the same bed. (Adam’s relationship with his mother is less Oedipal than Proustian.)

As Adam grows up, his older cousin Nora lets him in, piece by piece, on the family lore. Bluntly, she tells Adam that all their family’s problems have to do with sex. And here, the Brewster clan slots into Irving’s accurate but blinkered vision of the United States as a country violently inhospitable to sexual minorities. When Ray marries an English teacher named Elliot Barlow, some members of the family suspect she’s serving as his “beard.” There turns out to be a seed of truth to this, in that Ray is in fact a lesbian and Elliot is a gay man who eventually comes out as a transgender woman. Meanwhile, Ray’s judgmental sisters and puritan father, for Irving, represent not just cultural relics but persistent forces in American society.

The Brewster paterfamilias is imbued with pathos as he declines from dementia, but Adam’s aunts might as well be Cinderella’s evil step sisters. Irving, at this point in his life, has little time for exploring the psychology of intolerance; his focus is squarely on the victims and the survivors. Granted, he misses opportunities for nuance and complexity but stays true to his convictions. We may admire his humanism while at times cringing at his narrator’s unoriginal political broadsides and the author’s own bland, even condescending “love is love” perspective.

Some readers will undoubtedly take issue with Irving rooting his story in a heterosexual character’s experiences, but there’s an element of modesty to this approach that’s worth acknowledging, if not commending. Others may actually be relieved that Irving didn’t attempt to fully inhabit his gay and transgender characters’ lives; though he effectively dials up the pain of watching a loved one die from AIDS, his depiction of New York counterculture during the civil rights era is unconvincing, and thankfully only a small part of The Last Chairlift. Perhaps Irving’s boldest conceit, though, is showing the non-sexual married relationship between Ray and Elliot as nurturing for Adam and fulfilling for each other.