Irvingworld conjures nostalgia for when novel-writing felt more muscular — sport-like, even, when novelists were celebrities duking it out on talk shows. But this sustained sojourn can feel like an unrelenting avalanche of words from which one emerges blinking and dazed — a book to be not so much read as survived.
Irving has long maimed and killed off characters in shocking and unlikely ways, and blood spills so rapidly from “The Last Chairlift” that — maybe because Adam journeys with young son and hostile wife in tow to a historic and spooky Colorado hotel — one can get the uneasy feeling that he is duetting with another Master of the Middlebrow: Stephen King.
Adam will watch as relatives are struck by lightning; trapped under a derailed train; gunned down in a comedy club called the Gallows Lounge; run off the road in a truck while listening to a song called “No Lucky Star,” sung by a performer from the Gallows, also doomed, named Damaged Don.
The Brewsters are a peculiar bunch, forever dithering over sleeping arrangements, to the clucking disapproval of Little Ray’s sisters. (“Unkind critics have complained how I dispatch, or dispose of, the unlikable aunts in my fiction, but these critics never knew Aunt Abigail or Aunt Martha,” Adam writes.) Like episodes from “Friends,” his girlfriends will be given nicknames like “The One With the Limp” and “The Tall One With Her Arm in the Cast.” They will bleed from fibroids, tumble down stairs headfirst and lose bowel control in his bed. Genitals are cringingly squashed and assessed. “I hear you’ve got a vagina as big as a ballroom,” Little Ray sneers to one of her son’s older lovers on the phone.
Irving is gentlest to Elliot Barlow, a diminutive schoolteacher who will become Adam’s stepfather, and to Adam’s cousin Nora, a lesbian who does a stand-up gig at the Gallows called “Two Dykes, One Who Talks” with her girlfriend Em, who pantomimes instead of speaking. The only thing we hear out of Em’s mouth in the first part of the book is an orgasm so loud and sustained it causes a waitress to drop her tray, spill a water pitcher and fall to her knees. “I’d heard nothing like it, not even in foreign films with subtitles,” Adam writes. He’s still talking about this impressive climax on Page 866.
Irving has been a longtime champion of queerness in his novels, even if “queer” in this one is used only in the old, derogatory, unclaimed sense. Little Ray’s main squeeze turns out to be a trail groomer named Molly (often called just “the trail groomer”). Elliot (“the snowshoer”) will eventually transition genders, a change that provokes Adam’s affection and protectiveness. “There’s more than one way to love people, Kid,” Molly tells him, in one of this book’s occasional aww, amber-lit asides.
Preachy and tauntingly bawdy in patches, “The Last Chairlift” does have pleasurable stretches, when the air is clear and the terrain smooth. But unless you’re an Irving superfan craving a big summing-up, the novel’s muchness might simply suffocate.
THE LAST CHAIRLIFT, by John Irving | 912 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $38
