Adam Brewster, our protagonist, was born of his mother Rae's unplanned pregnancy. Rae was an elite-level skier, and children were nowhere on her radar. While she gave up on her Olympic dream, she lived away from the family home for much of the year, working as a ski instructor. Adam was raised primarily by family members, but he always idolized his mother.

The book later dives into sexuality of every variety, blurring the lines between genders and exploring the lives of transgender individuals and queer relationships. He even gets into the horror show that was the Reagan administration. Standing idly by while AIDS burned through the gay community is only one of the sins of our second-worst president.

The Last Chairlift was not my favorite John Irving novel (that was In One Person), but Irving writes the misfit and the misunderstood like no one else. It's a very long book, but it's very enjoyable as long as you're willing to take your time instead of powering through on a mission. As always, Irving's characters are distinct and well-described – you will never confuse characters in one of his novels.

I received this Advanced Reader Copy of The Last Chairlift from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I have to be honest, I did not make it through this. I was so excited to get my hands on a new John Irving book but....this was just not the ticket. The book felt like he did not have an editor and it felt like there were a lot of self-indulgent tangents he went on that were in no real particular way related to the story itself. Oh well. Irving has hit it out of the park before, so maybe we will just have to stick with Owen Meany.

I loved the storyline and was completely immersed but the book was too long!!
John Irving is a master storyteller and this book is no exception. I just wish it was shorter!

Thank you @netgalley for this Advanced Readers Copy. But I just can't get through this. It is long, and nothing is drawing me in. So I am dnfing.

Reading John Irving is a commitment. You have to be prepared for a slow build, with lots of character development. Despite some humor, his books are not “light” reading. Stick with it and you’ll suddenly find yourself fully immersed in the story…invested in the characters. You’re going to relate to some things, learn something new and have your heart wrenched (repeatedly). His latest is an excellent example of what he does best. Having read an uncorrected ARC, I can only hope that a thorough editing is able to trim the many instances of unnecessary repetition throughout the already lengthy book. Remove the repeats and this is a 5 star book.

"Think of your first good kiss. Was it life-changing, or was it no big deal? Do you remember how old you were? Did it matter, at the time, who gave it to you? Do you even remember who it was?
I’ll tell you this: when you’re thirteen and your mother gives you your first good kiss, you better hope someone matches it or eclipses it—soon. That’s your only hope."
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"Autobiography just isn’t good or bad enough to work as fiction… Unrevised, real life is just a mess."

The overall format is one of a frame, with Adam Brewster opening by letting us know that this is the story of his life and times, then returning to turn out the lights when the tale has been completed. It is a family saga of Irving’s era, 50’s 60s, (Vietnam) 70s, 80s (Reagan, AIDS) et al, to the mad, reactionary violence of the 21st century. Adam Brewster, a writer and screenwriter, is our narrator for a look at the sexual politics of a lifetime, from his birth in 1941 to his later days some eighty years on.

Adam’s mother, Rachel Brewster (Little Ray), was a nearly-pro ski nut, who spent large parts of every year on the slopes, settling for work as an instructor. That left Adam in the hands of his grandmother for much of his upbringing, assisted by a passel of relations. He would hunger for time with his only known parent for much of his life, a core element of the novel.

Readers of John Irving will recognize much that is familiar, from his prior work and his life. The novel is set in Exeter, New Hampshire, Irving’s home town; includes a benign stepparent teaching at Phillips Exeter (as his actual stepfather did); includes the narrator as a student there. Yep, Irving attended. There is wrestling, of course. Bears are limited to a kind of snowshoe shaped like their paws. A hotel figures large. There is an absent biological father, (Irving’s father was in the US Army Air Force. He never met him.); a mother with too many secrets; there is also reference made to an inappropriate relationship between an adult woman and an underage boy. (something Irving himself experienced); considerable attention is directed to feeling like, to being, an outsider.

”'That’s just who you are, Adam,' my older cousin said. 'There’s a foreignness inside you—beginning with where you come from. The foreignness is in you—that’s just who you are. You and me and Ray—we’re outliers.'”

In fact, Irving turns the tables here, as Adam, as the only straight among the main characters, is the outsider in his own family, always the last to get things, he is nonetheless loved and supported by his sexually diverse relations.

His mother’s lifelong lover, Molly, effectively his stepmother, tells Adam, “There’s more than one way to love people, Kid.” It serves as a core message for the book and for Irving’s oeuvre. One of the main characters is transgender. He first wrote a sympathetic trans character in The World According to Garp, in 1978. So, when his son, born many years after the book was published, came out to his parents as trans, she knew her father would be completely supportive.

The politics of divergent sexuality through time manifests in diverse venues. Raucous comedic material performed at a comedy club in one era is considered too much for a later sensibility, a new puritanism of correctness. Safety for being different is a concern. Adam is very worried when his stepfather is out in their town dressed as a woman, even trails him sometimes in case a backup is needed. Reagan’s unwillingness to address AIDS until six years into his presidency is noted. Acceptance increases over time, but increased acceptance sparks increased resistance. A performer of material deemed unacceptable to some becomes a target for violence in a more disturbed climate.

In addition to the overarching theme of looking at sexual politics, sexuality is shown as far less important than the connection between people. Things that may seem sexual actually have a lot less to do with sex than connection. For instance, Adam and his mother often sleep together, in the slumbering, not biblical sense, well past the age where that is generally deemed ok. There is another relationship in which a straight man and a gay woman share a bed, sans fooling around.

There is hilarity aplenty, not least with Adam’s young sequence of damaged or damaging lovers. Lots of cringy LOL material there. I counted a dozen “LOLs” in my notes, some for entire chapters.

And then there are ghosts. Irving calls this a ghost story. I refer you to a piece on his site that addresses this directly.

"Ghosts don’t just warn us about the future; they remind us of what we’ve forgotten about the past. All this is to say, I have a history of being interested in ghosts. And here come the ghosts again. In my new novel…the ghosts are more prominent than before; the ghosts, or hints of ghosts, begin and end the novel."

We all have ghosts we live with, but the ones here are visible, well, to some, anyway. They hang out in large numbers at a hotel in Aspen, but also turn up at home. The spectres are historical and familial, with some able to interact with the physical world (sometimes with LOL results) sometimes condemned to remain non-impactful. They do indeed, as noted above, remind us of the past, sometimes darkly so, but some offer direction and comfort. And Irving uses his behemoth of a novel to keep generating new ones. They pass over in a wide range of ways; lightning, murder on a stage, sudden avalanche, cancer, suicide, murder in a hotel, falling from a chairlift, leaping from a chairlift, death in war, et al. Falkner famously said “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.” I guess it could be said for many characters in The Last Chairlift that even the dead are never entirely dead.

Adam’s profession offers ample opportunity for Irving (winner of a National Book Award AND a screenwriting Oscar) to present a wealth of material about writing, both for the screen and for print.

"'My life could be a movie,' you hear people say, but what do they mean? Don’t they mean their lives are too incredible to be real—too unbelievably good or bad? “My life could be a movie” means you think movies are both less than realistic and more than you can expect from real life. “My life could be a movie” means you think your life has been special enough to get made as a movie; it means you think your life has been spectacularly blessed or cursed.
But my life is a movie, and not for the usual self-congratulatory or self-pitying reasons. My life is a movie because I’m a screenwriter. I’m first and foremost a novelist, but even when I write a novel, I’m a visualizer—I’m seeing the story unfold as if it were already on film."
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"Imagining the stories you want to write, and waiting to write them, is part of the writing process—like thinking about the characters you want to create, but not creating them. Yet when I did this, when I was just a kid at Exeter—when I thought about writing all the time, but I never finished anything I was writing—this amounted to little more than daydreaming."
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"you don’t see with hindsight in a first draft. You have to finish the first draft to see what you’ve missed."
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"Fiction writers like what we call truthful exaggeration. When we write about something that really happened—or it almost happened, could have happened—we just enhance what happened. Essentially, the story remains real, but we make it better than it truly was, or we make it more awful—­depending on our inclination."

There are many more—it is a very long book—but this last one in particular speaks very directly to Irving’s process. As noted up top, he returns to familiar themes and situations. In interviews he says that he begins with the same life experiences, but then changes where they go, how they morph, as if his creative process was to take the stem cells of his experiences and direct them to grow into a wide range of possible pieces. Same source, different outcomes.

It is not just the characters and situation that have morphed, it is the form as well. As Adam is a screenwriter as well as a novelist, and as this story is Adam’s, it is fitting that how he perceives the world makes its way into how he presents his story. There are long chapters that are written in screenplay format, complete with fade-ins, fade-outs, off-screen narration, closeups, wide-shots, the whole toolkit. It is an interesting tactic. I found it off-putting, but it does allow for a different approach to the material.

He does not just talk about writing per se, but incorporates into the novel considerable attention to his favorite book of all time, Moby Dick. (he has the last line of Moby Dick tattooed on his left forearm) This book opens with My mother named me Adam…, which resonates with Call me Ishmael and no less with …I am born from David Copperfield, Dickens being a particular Irving favorite. He sees himself as more of a 19th century novelist than a 21st century one.

"…because those novels have always represented the model of the form for me. I loathed Hemingway. I thought Faulkner was excessive. Fitzgerald was ok, but lazy at times. I was enamored of the kind of novel all of my classmates at school despised."

References to Melville’s masterpiece (sometimes hilariously), Dickens, Ibsen, and plenty of others abound.

It is pretty clear that John Irving has had an interesting life. Eighty years old at the time of publication, he does not see The Last Chairlift as his last hurrah. In fact, he signed a three-book deal with Simon and Schuster, of which this was merely the first. He promises, though, that the next two will be a lot shorter.

Until then, this one will certainly suffice. Irving has lost none of his sense of humor. This book was more than occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. He has lost none of his feel for writing relatable humans. While some of the supporting cast are painted in broad strokes, to illustrate this or that sociopolitical issue of a given time, the main ones, and even hordes of second-tier characters are drawn with fine lines, and deep sensitivity. He has lost none of his vision, seeing clearly the currents of the eras considered, and how those have impacted social and political possibility for rounded humans who do not fit the square holes of a boilerplate majority. For all that Irving writes about people who are different, he makes it eminently clear that in matters that count we all share the same needs, to be loved, seen, and respected for who we are. Here’s hoping it will not be another seven years until we get to enjoy another of John Irving’s marvelous works.

"…the dead don’t entirely go away—not if you see them on the subway, or in your heart."

Review posted – February 18, 2023

Publication date – October 18, 2022

I received an ARE of The Last Chairlift from Simon & Schuster in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

For the properly formatted review, with links, et al, please head on over to the version on my site, https://cootsreviews.com/2023/02/17/the-last-chairlift-by-john-irving/

I have loved so many of John Irving's novels, but this one just wasn't for me. Perhaps I have changed in my love of different writing styles, but I couldn't engage with any of this story.

John Irving delivers another meandering tale that investigates the parent-child relationship between, the narrator, Adam, and his mother. Adam's mother, Little Ray, is a ski instructor, who becomes pregnant while on a trip to Aspen when she is nineteen years old. Adam is her "one and only" as she kindly reminds him. She is both doting (their relationship is uncomfortably close at times) and distant since she spends half the year as a ski instructor. This means that Adam is raised by his grandparents and his older cousin Nora. As is typical in Irving's novels, the familial relationships are odd and truly present a cast of odd but endearing characters. Through these characters, Irving investigates gender roles, sexuality, and LGBTQ+ issues before there was legislation for equal rights. I thought that Irving does a good job of developing characters that demonstrate that love is love. And of course, Irving cannot escape New England as a setting for a portion of the novel

"The Last Chairlift" strays from Iriving's typical storylines in that he incorporates a supernatural element because Adam and his mother can see ghosts. These ghosts are not tied to the place they died but can travel. The reader as well as the other characters suspend their disbelief and just accept that ghosts exist and that Adam interacts with them. In addition, Adam, who is a novelist (hmm. . . autobiographical Mr. Irving?) writes a screenplay that tells when he meets his father for the first time. This "story" is in the style of a screenplay, which was unexpected and seemed disconnected.

Although this novel is quite the tome and took several months to read it and several breaks, I enjoyed the unusual story and found the characters to be humorous and endearing. With that being said, I would not recommend this novel to the general public, meaning I would only recommend it to my English-teacher friends and die-hard Irving fans because of the sheer length as well as the oddities of characters and plot.

I would like to thank John Irving, Simon & Shuster, and NetGalley for the advanced copy of this novel..

The Last Chairlift may be Irving’s final long work, but one can hope other, shorter pieces are forthcoming. The author’s talent and legacy are too great for this to be the send-off he leaves us with.

Marvelous.… pure storytelling with appealing characters.
Many thanks to Simon & Schuster and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

While I appreciate an ARC of The Last Chairlift by the publisher and Net Galley, I did not enjoy this book. I read the first 100 pages and had to leave it.
DNF

John Irving is a towering figure in modern fiction with books that are intelligent and popular. I first read a book by him called Setting Free the Bears when I was in college and my professor knew the author. He has gone from strength to strength since then.

The Last Chairlift is reportedly the last novel that Irving plans to write. He has given readers a rather long book at over 900 pages that some may enjoy more than others.

Here is the story of skier Rachel Brewer whose career takes a new turn after she becomes pregnant. Years later her son, Adam, returns to Colorado seeking to better understand his mother and himself. Adam also wants to find out more about his father. Oh, and there are some ghosts in this title that creates its own universe with a unique family at its center.

Readers who have followed Irving will want to give this title a look

Many thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for this title. All opinions are my own.

My friend convinced me to read a John Irving book and I decided to start with his newest one first. I should have asked her to recommend which one to start with because this one was such a hard one to read. I had absolutely no interest in the story or characters and it just kept going and going. I thought it would for sure pick up and I would see what my friend was talking about and continued to read. I should have stopped. I will read another one of their books but will ask for recommendations first.

This is a lifelong story, delivered free-association style. Many, many, many digressions and repetitions stretch a patient reader's tolerance levels, but for me the patience invoked was worth every effort it took.

Adam is our host and narrator for the long hauls, with occasional intrusions that lead into odd and sometimes questionable relevance areas that take time to hook into the story-at-large. But. Irving-style, they do. NO word wasted. And while the book repeats and repeats certain phrases, certain words, certain whole stories previously told, I began to suspect it was a kind of poetical device to nail into the reader a blatant foreshadowing reminder that would later deepen a plot point. . .

This is not a read for some. This is definitely a read worth taking the time that may challenge tolerance, acceptance and understanding boundaries that impose themselves in the reading experience. I found mine positively stretched. I fell in love with these characters, doing things I would never in my lifetime consider doing - but I wrapped myself around them and understood why they do the "crazy" - my word, my issue - things they do. There is an education in this book. Not everyone wants an education in fiction, but I'm pretty sure that is what every fiction is and ever has been from the beginning of our telling stories to each other.

I was amused by and my interest re-kindled in Moby Dick, and as a grandma that reads relentlessly to my grandkids, loved that Nana had read it completely to Adam before his teens, and it was her Bible, kept close at all times. The entire family could quote whole passages. . . .so dear Reader, a little brush-up on MD will deepen your reading experience with this book.

It's not a Prayer for Owen Meany, my favorite work by Irving. But it's not too far off that track.

A Sincere Thank you to John Irving, Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an ARC to read and review. #TheLastChairLift #NetGalley.

This novel continues to amaze me when I think of all the twists and turns it took. This is definitely a John Irving novel. He is masterful in the way he interweaves the story lines and creates such memorable characters. WE live an entire life with these people and it's well worth the time.

John Irving is back. As a long-time fan of his writing, I eagerly anticipated the arrival of this new book. I was excited to receive an ARC ebook from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest opinion. The Last Chairlift is a beautifully written, multigenerational, family saga with character development that will make you feel like part of the family. It is so detailed that it seems to go on forever. Since I'd received an ebook, I started out blindly reading with no concept as to how long the book was. When I finally looked and saw the length, I laid it aside. I just didn't think I liked it enough to continue. It haunted me and I had to finish. I am glad I did. Irving is great, this book is great, just very long.

Wow, this book was long. Unnecessarily long. But otherwise, it's classic Irving - a multigenerational story with quirky characters in small town New England focused on the lifetime of writer Adam Brewster. There are hotels, there's wrestling, Adam's father is absent - it gives the reader deja vu and fans of Irving's will enjoy what feels a bit like a "best of" but I wish it had been a bit less meandering.

Thanks to Simon and Schuster for the copy to review.

A new John Irving book is cause for celebration. Everything you love about his writing is here: quirky characters, absurd situations, wrestling, a fraught mother-son relationship, Moby Dick, ghosts, weaving and satisfying plot threads, The story spans decades, spending a lot of time with Adam in his early and teen years before hopping years as he ages.

Containing plenty of laugh out loud funny moments. I loved Adam's uncles, who responded to everything with inappropriate laughter. "What were you thinking, Martin? 'The Third Man Theme' isn't wedding music, you moron!" one of the aunts conveys to her husband. The whole passage leading up to this statement is hysterical, and the book is full of them, contributing to its 900+ page count.

The nicknames were golden: the Snowcat Operator, the Little Snowshoer, the Little Barlows, the Principal Emeritus/Diaper Man, to name a few. And Adam's girlfriends over the years. Oh dear.

It's not all fun and games with political and gender themes a big part of the narrative. The earnestness of the characters results in a heartfelt story, Irving creating a world that draws you in. We're invested in these characters and their world through the end.

My thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. The Last Chairlift was published in October 2022.

I feel like John Irving is a “famous” author, one that everyone knows about or has heard about. I think this is because of his novel The Cider House Rules, which was a bestselling novel AND movie. I was excited to get my hands on an early review copy of The Last Chairlift, and when I read that this is going to be his last long novel, I was even more excited and eager to read it. The summary intrigued me even more, especially when reading that it is “a ghost story, a love story, and a lifetime of sexual politics”.

This is not a quick easy read, it reads more like a biography or memoir than a work of fiction, and the writing is advanced and sometimes a bit hard to follow. And the content… oof! I felt completely uncomfortable and shocked at the sexual scenes, topics, and lingo. I am not a prude but I think I was just surprised for some reason and wasn’t expecting it at all, especially knowing the age of the author. Some scenes were disturbing and left me with my jaw dropped. I loved reading about the ghosts and especially Adam/Little Ray, his family, and the family dynamics. This family is very dysfunctional, which makes for great reading, but man did my heart ache for this boy.

I am glad I had the opportunity to read it, and I’m glad I read it. Not an easy read at all, and there are disturbing and sensitive scenes, yet I feel like this is one of those novels that everyone should read and many will be talking about for a long long time.

This was actually my first John Irving--unfortunately, and disappointinly, I could not connect with it & dnf.

With great thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for this e-ARC!