This novel is not for those without readerly stamina. At 912 pages, you are going to have to love John Irving dearly, or have a passion for reading novels come hell or high water. If the former, then it’s hard to see the publication of The Last Chairlift as anything other than good news, in so far as there’s now a great deal more Irving to read. But what about those of us in the latter camp who are only, say, Irving-curious?
The first thing to note is that this is Irving’s 15th novel – and that he is now 80. By any measure, he has been a hugely successful writer, and has touched millions of hearts: The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany were massive global hits. This book retreads familiar Irving territory: uncertain paternity issues; long passages about wrestling; unconventional people in conventional small town New England; physically small characters; characters who are writers; a mute character; lots of discussion of cinema; a great deal of sex and sexual politics.
This is the story of Adam Brewster’s life and family from the 1940s to almost the present day. His mother, Little Ray, a ski instructor, won’t tell him who his father is, but is happily in a lifelong relationship with Molly. Later, in a marriage of convenience (but also of love and respect), Little Ray formally weds Mr Barlow, who transitions from male to female during the course of the novel. We also meet Adam’s grandparents, his aunts, his uncles and several of his variously banjaxed girlfriends.
The best of the novel comes in Irving’s unusual scene writing, and this remains his great imaginative strength. He consistently avoids the cliches of setup and setting and deftly draws you in as a witness to the outlandish. Adam is in bed with Jasmine, one of his ill-fated girlfriends, for example, and the ghost of his grandfather appears, naked except for his nappy. Then the grandfather “squatted, grunting. Could ghosts crap? Did they? … Not to be outdone … Jasmine – still standing on the bed – let her bowels go ...” Enter Dottie, an elderly carer and “fix-it person”, looking like “the Angel of Death”, covered in pale face cream and wearing a contraption like a lampshade around her head. “Looks like your lady-friend shoulda been wearin’ the diaper.”
By contrast, there’s a very moving and – again – oddly original scene when Adam goes to recover the corpses of a couple who have decided to end their lives together at the top of the ski slopes following a cancer diagnosis, and rides the chairlift down between the two frozen bodies. “I sat close… holding them tight … I admired the life they had made together, and how they’d chosen to end it.”
Initially, I relished the assembly of characters – the different sexualities at play, the transgressive mother, Mr Barlow. But part of me could not help but feel that after 900 pages I had learned very little about the experience of a fellow human being transitioning genders, for example. Or what really caused Em, the mute character, to talk? And sure, I was interested in the son-kissing mother, but disappointed that all she really does is giggle and behave elliptically, so that it became harder and harder to take the Oedipal notes of the story seriously. It would be overstating the case to say that Irving is merely gestural in this book, but it’s as though he brilliantly imagines scenes and characters and then omits to give the latter much interesting or plausible interiority – like writing a screenplay and relying on a director or actors to bring the depth.
Nor did I get along with Irving’s folksy and self-conscious humour. He uses the wry formulation “sleeping arrangements”, for example, over and over again; ostensibly to mock those who might object to them, and conversely to assert that the novel has no problem with who has sex with whom. But the repetition makes you feel that the text is protesting too much, and that the book covertly participates in exactly the same prurience it purports to decry.
Irving has been compared to Dickens, but on the evidence of this novel that is far-fetched. He has little of Dickens’s sophisticated and multivalent command of register, and only a fraction of his psychological dexterity. His vocabulary lacks invention and his word selection is staunchly unremarkable. I’m afraid the book is also very poorly edited – if at all. There’s a lot of tedious repetition, while at one point Irving plonks over 150 pages of screenplay in the middle of the text. In it, there’s a line of dialogue that reads: “Unrevised real life is just a mess.” Unrevised manuscripts – the same.
• The Last Chairlift by John Irving is published by Scribner UK (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
