The Last Chairlift is a first for John Irving

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Even at 80, there are firsts. Even after an Oscar, a National Book Award, endless weeks on international bestsellers lists. The Last Chairlift, John Irving’s 15th novel, is the author’s first novel as a Canadian citizen. At nearly 900 pages, it is also his longest.

And it is the last of his great, big novels.

It also marks, as he explained during an interview in his Toronto office, his swan song to writing screenplays.

“Now I have to choose. And I want to keep writing novels for as long as I can write novels and I don’t want to write any more scripts – for television or for films,” Irving said during the late September interview. “For the time remaining to me, I want to write novels.”

Irving was about two weeks past a COVID-19 diagnosis and feeling very well. COVID was less awful than some colds he has had, despite his age – and his asthma. It was not only mild, it was something of a gift for a man who works in isolation anyway. “An excuse to do [nothing],” he said, using slightly more colourful language.

His screenwriting days are over, but certainly not his writing days. As he publishes The Last Chairlift, he is already several chapters into his next novel.

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The Last Chairlift is the story of Adam, an American writer. It contains many of the familiar Irving tropes, including the autobiographical ones: the author protagonist, the single mother, the missing father, the loving stepfather. It’s set in Exeter, N.H. – where Irving himself was born as John Wallace Blunt Jr. in 1942. Adam, like Irving, writes his stories with the endings in mind. Screenplays written by Adam form two chunks of the book – a good way for Irving to say goodbye to the craft, he thought.

The autobiography provides just the bones, the beginnings – as it has in several of Irving’s other novels, including The World According to Garp. The story branches out into all sorts of fictional departures.

Adam’s mother is a proficient skier whose compactness has earned her the nickname Little Ray. Adam does not know who his father is. But no matter; he has a village to raise him – including an older cousin, Nora, and Elliot, an English teacher who likes to snowshoe and ends up marrying Little Ray. Adam is straight (and not very good with – or to – women) but his life is populated by queer people, all of whom are much more together than Adam himself. One of them, Em, has Canadian roots.

While the identity of Adam’s father is a mystery for much of the book, Irving himself has always known who his biological father was – at least, his name. “Because I had it until my mother remarried and I became John Winslow Irving. I grew up Johnny Blunt,” he said. He had also seen photos of himself as a baby in a soldier’s arms. That soldier was John Blunt Sr.

Even as an adult, though, Irving never tracked him down, never reunited with his bio-dad. Years later, he learned that John Blunt Sr. had quietly come to watch Irving’s wrestling matches, back when the writer competed in the sport.

Irving did not try to find his father because he had not wanted to upset his stepfather, who gave him his new name and his beautiful upbringing.

“When I was six years old, this wonderful man came into my life. I had never had anyone like that. And he became the best father anyone could have had. And I felt it would have betrayed my stepfather who gave me his name. And I loved him so much, Colin Irving, that I named my first kid after him.”

Irving gets up from the round wooden table where we’re sitting and walks over to a photo on the wall. John Blunt Sr., in wartime. In another photo, Blunt is with his air force squad.

“Now he doesn’t so much look like me, this guy, my father. But how much does he look like my son, Colin? See that?” said Irving, pointing to a photo of Colin (whose 53rd birthday happened to be that day).

“Colin … looks like a dead ringer for my father.”

Nearby on the wall filled with family photos are two black-and-whites of the future John Irving at his mother’s wedding to his stepfather. “That’s … a close-up of me looking like I’m about to throw up the wedding cake, which I did, apparently. I don’t remember that part. But it looks like I’ve already had too much of it.”

We eventually get back to discussing the book. When I ask what was going on in the world and in his life when he began The Last Chairlift, wondering about the genesis of the idea, Irving directs me instead to a metaphor: the virtual train depot that lives in his brain.

His answer to this question elicits a nearly 40-minute-long reply (”I realize that my answers are as long as my goddamned novel,” he said at one point). But it comes down to this: Irving has collected ideas his whole life. They sit there parked, like boxcars, waiting to be attached to an engine that will drive them into a novel.

This idea had been brewing for a long while. And time was of the essence. It was not a question of how long the novel was going to be (although it wound up longer than Irving had expected). But of how much research he would need to do before even beginning.

“The last three or four trains out of the station, I tried to take the hardest one first. Because it’s not going to get easier,” he said, taking a sip of water from a Mason jar.

“I … felt some relief in December of 2016 that I knew I was taking the last long train in the station. I knew that at the time, 2016, when there were three trains still in there, three lines of boxcars still in the station – and now I’d say there’s one more. But I knew I was leaving all the shorter trains behind. So I knew whatever’s left is going to be an easier novel to write than the last three or the last four, right? And that uplifted me.”

The novel, written from Adam’s perspective, is a family saga but it is also fiercely political. Irving had reservations: what he calls the Garp factor (“it’s about a goddamned writer”) and also that he knew it had to be written in the first person to be most effective, never his first choice.

While Irving makes it clear that this idea had been brewing for a while, it is significant that he began writing it in December, 2016, the month after the election of Donald Trump.

Trump takes a beating in this book, as does Ronald Reagan (his handling of the AIDS epidemic – the silence, the abdication of responsibility, in particular), the Republican Party in general and the people Irving worries are becoming its soul.

“Without the mob of people who were eager to participate in Trump’s xenophobias and his other hatreds, where would Trump have been? He didn’t create an audience; it pre-existed them. He just became their spokesperson.”

Irving has been ahead of the feminist and gender issues curve, writing about abortion, homophobia and gender fluidity long before such thinking became airport-novel mainstream. Consider Roberta Muldoon, from Garp, his breakthrough 1978 novel – played by John Lithgow in the film adaptation. She is one of the book’s most important and most sympathetic characters.

There’s a trans woman at the centre of The Last Chairlift, too. As in Garp, she is one of the story’s best people. But this time Irving was able to borrow from autobiography. His youngest child, Eva Everett Irving, is a trans woman. Garp was written before she was even born.

There are also ghosts in The Last Chairlift. The inn where Adam is conceived, The Hotel Jerome, plays an important role in the story. The hotel – a real one, in Aspen, Colo. – is said to be haunted.

Irving is a believer who has never personally seen a ghost – and not for lack of trying. For this book, he travelled to the Aspen hotel with his assistant, Khalida Hassan. He set himself up for a visitation: staying in the suite that proprietor Jerome B. Wheeler himself had slept in, and travelling in the off-season, when ghosts might be short on people to visit. Irving saw none. But when he called Hassan in her room the next morning, she was rattled.

“She woke up at 2 or 3 in the morning and the light was on in the bathroom and the water was being turned on and off and the sounds of the squeegee on the glass were squeaking away,” Irving recalled. It was one of the inn’s famous ghosts, he explained: the hotel maid who fell into a pond, died of pneumonia, and still comes back to turn down the beds and tidy up the bathrooms.

We talk, of course, about Canada. Irving became a (dual) citizen in December, 2019 – the same month Adam becomes a Canadian citizen in the novel. Long before that, Irving moved here for love. His Canadian wife, Janet (Turnbull) Irving, moved with him earlier in their relationship to the United States. And now he is returning the favour, he explained. His move had nothing to do with politics. But after the 2016 U.S. presidential election in which Trump triumphed over Hillary Clinton, he began fielding questions from fellow Americans.

“After so many of my fellow Democrats failed to support Mrs. Clinton” – big sigh here – “I had uncountable American friends naturally saying, ah, you know, about that thing you did, how do we do that?” He laughs his big laugh.

Irving loves Toronto. He is a big fan of the public transit; there’s a section of the novel that is basically a love letter to the TTC (how often do you hear that?) – in particular, the subway and the voice that announces the stations.

I also bookmarked several spots in the book that were less than complimentary to journalists. Adam calls one female reporter “a ditz;” another male reporter is described as “pushy.” One character refuses to speak to reporters – to her credit. With all of the other autobiographical elements, these shots could add to the layer of nerves one feels walking into an interview with the literary legend.

But Irving is warm and friendly, appreciative of the physical manifestation of the interview prep, noticing the Post-it rainbow I’ve made in my copy of the book. “Look at your sticky notes; Jesus.”

And if his kind manner, his insistence on brewing a coffee for you, his tour of the apartment and absolute pride at showing his daughter’s room allow you to forget momentarily that you are in the presence of an icon, there are plenty of reminders all around. The photos on the wall – Irving with Salman Rushdie, Irving on the night he won an Academy Award for the screenplay for The Cider House Rules, the golden Oscar itself.

While Adam’s scripts are Irving’s send-off to screenwriting, there is still Irving’s penultimate project to look forward to. Prior to finishing the novel, he wrote for a television adaptation of The World According to Garp. While he did not want to be the showrunner or even in the writers’ room (Melissa Rosenberg has since been named head writer), Irving did deliver five scripts: the first two and the last three.

“I thought this is the last screenwriting I want to do,” he said. “But even as I said it to myself, I said, ‘Except for that goddamned novel that has to have a screenplay in it,’” he laughed.

“Writers can’t stop writing,” Irving writes in that novel, the last big one. It’s Adam explaining that he will never retire as a writer. And how he hopes to die: before his companion, with “my head on my desk, in the middle of a sentence [she] would finish for me.”