Irving obsessively states their ages and professions every few pages, if not their names. If you’re worried you won’t keep all the characters straight, don’t be. It all leads to a sense of disjointedness for the reader. And once you’ve moved past one chapter, more stuff just…happens, again without any real connection to what came before. Sometimes they are connected to prior occurrences, but often not. You can’t help but experience déjà vu as you move from page to page, yet this is far from the only weakness in the book. Or do you feel like encountering a transgender former athlete who becomes a beloved parental figure? Here, Garp’s retired football player Roberta Muldoon is repackaged as wrestler Elliot Barlow (who remains “Mr.” Barlow post-transition for reasons unexplained). In The Last Chairlift, you get a pantomime artist (do such performers even exist?) named Emily. Would you like to meet young women who voluntarily mute themselves to protest sexual violence? In Garp, you have the Ellen Jamesians. Do you want to read about a mother who impregnates herself via someone who cannot consent to sex? In Garp, the future baby’s father is a comatose soldier. Certainly, authors are free to revisit subjects and frequently do, but in The Last Chairlift, Irving returns to such specific plot points from The World According to Garp that you wonder if he’s simply rewriting old material. If you’ve read anything by him before, you’ve read this book. Worse, Irving so often repeats themes from his earlier books that it borders on self-plagiarism.
There’s not much to say about the book’s plot, unfortunately, because it doesn’t have one. The narrative spans the 20th century, the American landscape, and a host of what Irving in the past would have called “sexual outlaws.” The novel centers on Adam, his mother, her husband (a beloved mentor to Adam), and his mother’s lesbian partner, as well as on Adam’s cousin and her partner (who later becomes his wife). Topping out at over 900 pages, The Last Chairlift would be a slog even if you weren’t already familiar with many of the tropes it employs.
If that’s the case, he appears to be going for word count to make his swansong memorable.
Irving has stated that this is his final long novel. Which is why it’s such a tragedy that his latest novel, The Last Chairlift, simply does not live up to his other work. The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, and A Prayer for Owen Meany are classics of modern literature.
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