Henceforth the man, whose full name is Elliot Barlow, is referred to mostly as “the snowshoer.” (Adam’s mom, called Little Ray, is also very small. His mother falls in love with an English teacher at Exeter Academy, whom Adam admires for his diminutive stature and his distaste for downhill skiing. In good fiction, isn’t everything connected to everything else?” In “The Last Chairlift,” Irving tries to do both - tell a fictional story that is chock full of random events, but make it feel like nothing is random at all in hindsight, as Adam relates it all to us.Īt the beginning of the book, Adam doesn’t know who his biological father is. Things just happen, random things that have no connection to one another. But as narrator Adam admits: “Real life is so sloppy - it’s full of coincidences. Every Irving fan will read it and even readers trying Irving for the first time will find it an accessible introduction to the New England-born novelist whose work has always been stuffed with serious themes like religion, sex and politics, tempered by a fair dose of satire and absurdity, delivered by narrators in an endearing, matter-of-fact prose.Īt its heart “The Last Chairlift” is a love story, telling almost the entire life story of its narrator, Adam Brewster, himself a writer growing up in Exeter, New Hampshire, who wrestles, becomes a bestselling novelist, wins an Oscar and earns Canadian citizenship, not unlike Mr.
It’s difficult to do justice to this book in a short review.
He’s written a book longer than most editions of “Moby-Dick.” And by the time you’re done reading it, you’ll chuckle every time you see the hyphen in Melville’s title. “The Last Chairlift” by John Irving (Simon & Schuster)Īfter 54 years and 15 novels, John Irving’s finally done it.
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