Irving refuses to be embarrassed by anything, a quality that fits the tenor of his work ... The Last Chairlift is eminently readable, stocked with characters and relationships easy to invest in, even when things get a little queasy making. Irving has been cranking out novels for 54 years, establishing a consistent generosity of spirit that continues through his most recent book. If anyone has earned the right to deliver one more gargantuan tome, it’s him. For readers it’s once more down the hill, with a haste that belies the enormity of the task.
An imposing brick of paper ... I have no objection to long books. My favorite novel last year was The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, which also clocks in at more than 800 pages. But Jeffers has a lot to say. Irving has a lot to say again ... Fans of the author’s work may appreciate the invitation to survey this vast rearrangement of his cherished tropes ... At his best he’s a visualizer. The most arresting sections of The Last Chairlift are powerfully cinematic scenes — either comic or violent ... Whenever The Last Chairlift is actively expanding the boundaries of what a family can be — the story feels vital and exciting ... Despite their autobiographical elements, the sections about Adam’s success as an author and his move to Canada feel perfunctory and devoid of life. And far too many chapters sound self-indulgent and redundant.
The contents of Chairlift may be so familiar...that at times it feels like a reboot of his 1978 classic, The World According to Garp ... If Chairlift centers on the big stuff — love, sex, death — it also feels oddly small. Irving tries a couple of rhetorical gambits throughout the novel ... Still, Adam's essential quest is straightforward, and the novel's bulk only thins out its urgency. A book half or even a third of its size could have done the job more powerfully ... There are moments, though, when Irving's old magic emerges: his wit and fearlessness around sex, and his grasp of the wide ripple effects of intolerance.
It would hardly be an Irving novel if it weren’t stuffed — sometimes overstuffed ... A tough old-fashioned bildungsroman that meanders more than it moves, with its creator’s customary herks, jerks, digressions and Rabelaisian excesses ... We also get an amusing taxonomy of film noir that includes creepy noir, caper noir, gunfighter noir, porno noir ... His latest will certainly keep you occupied, if intermittently lulled and grossed out ... This sustained sojourn can feel like an unrelenting avalanche of words from which one emerges blinking and dazed — a book to be not so much read as survived ... Preachy and tauntingly bawdy in patches, The Last Chairlift does have pleasurable stretches, when the air is clear and the terrain smooth. But unless you’re an Irving superfan craving a big summing-up, the novel’s muchness might simply suffocate.
Irving’s position has always been unequivocally clear ... Unconventionalities never occasion anguish within the family, quite the reverse: however bizarre their set-up might be, families pull together and face the world until the world backs down ... The Last Chairlift seems less like a novel than a baggy, discursive memoir ... Often there is no discernible plot to keep you turning the pages ... The Last Chairlift is not Irving at his best. It is too loose, too rambling. It is perhaps telling that one of the book’s disdained characters is a book editor, because the last thing this novel seems to have had is an editor to rein it in and tighten it up.
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 ... It’s not that you want The Last Chairlift to end, exactly, but you do want to see where all the characters end up off after that final ride up the mountain.
Not for those without readerly stamina ... This book retreads familiar Irving territory ... 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 ... Initially, I relished the assembly of characters ... But part of me could not help but feel that after 900 pages I had learned very little ... 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 ... 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.
... like a diner jukebox, it faithfully sticks with the author’s hits ... The elegiac nature of Adam’s reflections accounts for the main difference between The Last Chairlift and a rampaging, weeping novel like The World According to Garp, especially as it manifests itself in this book’s frankly insuperable length ... as is characteristic of late works of fiction, the plot here has been thinned down to its barest elements and replaced by what could politely be called woolgathering ... Its diffuse, somewhat distracted, sense of déjà vu gives “The Last Chairlift” the feel of an unearthed time capsule, which contains many things from the past but lacks the organizational motive that brought it all together in the first place. Whether Mr. Irving, now 80, has fallen victim to the laws of diminishing returns or is simply indulging in a kind of protracted career retrospective is hard to know, but Irving addicts who endure to the end will leave the book thinking fondly, again, of Garp.
... it’s hard not to read The Last Chairlift, with its elegiac tone and sprawling time horizon, as a final, all-encompassing summary of Irving’s concerns and obsessions ... Then again, Irving’s novels have seemed like 'greatest hits' collections for years now. Sometimes lazily and sometimes transformatively, he’s reconfigured his favorite plot elements, settings, and autobiographical details into works that will feel comfortingly familiar to some and stale to others. Rainer Werner Fassbinder once remarked that every great director has only one subject, and ultimately makes the same film over and over again. Irving, working primarily as a novelist and sometimes as a screenwriter, seems to have taken this idea literally ... less insightful on Irving’s major political subject, sexual intolerance, than it is about the peculiar personalities of all the other major characters ... We may admire his humanism while at times cringing at his narrator’s unoriginal political broadsides and the author’s own bland, even condescending 'love is love' perspective ... Irving, indeed, is one of the most talented novelists of his generation, which is why the protracted longeurs in his work are so frustrating. Few living writers can outdo him at plot construction; the first act of The Last Chairlift is a master class in the gradual accumulation of details and unanswered questions, all of which pay off in a tragically madcap finale. Perhaps it’s simply that childhood is Irving’s best subject, as the early parts of his novels are often the most engaging. But reckoning with the frustration of a John Irving novel, pushing through it to reach the payoff, is, at this point, an inextricable part of the experience of reading him. In that sense, no matter how many shorter books come forth, this shall be the last John Irving novel.
Irving’s majestic latest...is a multigenerational portrait as colorful and varied as it is complex and quirky as it echoes and pays homage to the author’s own rich literary history ... Irving infuses the narrative with countless comedic set pieces, some farcical, others wistfully tender. The emotionally resonant result is sweepingly cinematic, reminding the reader that Irving has a screenwriting Oscar. Autobiographical snippets and splashes of brilliance buttress the themes of death and aging, memory and identity, in an elegiac testimony to the many facets of familial love.
For fans who’ve followed him over the course of a career spanning more than half a century, The Last Chairlift will feel like settling into a well-worn pair of slippers. They’ll have plenty of time to savor that comfortable sensation ... A fitting valediction to his distinguished literary career.
... punctuated by rather spectacular deaths -- so many of them, in fact, that it rather undermines their effectiveness. There are several two-for-one shared deaths, there are suicides and murder, and also the simply spectacular: as with much in this book, it's all a bit much, and mostly to too little effect ... For a narrator who is a successful writer and who is presenting his life-story, Adam reveals surprisingly little about his own works. We learn some about the success of the novels, but essentially nothing about their substance -- an odd void in this big life-story, especially when contrasted with the screen-work of Adam's father, which is described and analyzed in much, much closer detail ... for all its bloat that is one of the problems with The Last Chairlift, how much is left out ... Stuffing so much in here, Irving doesn't so much lose the plot as himself and his protagonist ... There's quite a bit here that is entertaining -- good, colorful storytelling of the kind Irving has often pulled off before ... It is, ultimately, a very long novel, and simply too baggy; it is, ultimately, a slog -- made manageable by some admittedly very bright spots. But Irving tackles too much here -- and too much of it not hard enough, stuffing it in along the way rather than really going at it.
John Irving’s 15th novel is 11 shy of 900 pages long. And boy, did I feel every one of those pages ... a baffling amount of weak literary explication and juvenile political opining ... The most notably shoehorned element (and there are many, including the ghosts that irritatingly scamper throughout) is the inclusion of excerpts of Adam’s film script – so unnecessary and ill-advised in this already flabby book, it’s difficult not to wonder if this might have been a rejected love-project of Irving’s ... The truly discomfiting aspect of this book, though, has to be the hyper-sexualisation of the female characters therein. Early on, a young woman’s loud orgasm is described or referenced, by my count, 16 times. Yes, Irving could argue that this is told from a teenage boy’s perspective, and thus that focusing on all things arousing is only natural. But these leering and, again, endlessly repeated descriptions, read more like the errant mental wanderings of a horny older man than the thoughts of a pubescent boy ... There is so much more I could’ve written, but thankfully, unlike Irving, I have a word count to consider.
The thing is, John Irving is a genius –a comic, warm, brilliant genius. The fact that this book is terrible is simply something we must all just get over. Everyone has forgotten to press the lock button on an Intercity train and had the door opened on them. Let’s not do that to a brilliant titan of American literature, someone who on his best days touches Dickens ... [an] incredible amount of horribly described sex ... This book negates nothing; it takes nothing away from one of the greatest ever novelists in English – a man who wrote the counter-culture with such glee and wit and clarity and deep humanity. There is no need even to mention its stupid title, which somehow manages to exclude the population of the world who is either unfamiliar with, or does not enjoy, skiing.
Overblown and underplotted ... The search for Adam’s father’s identity provides a thriller element, but it never generates much narrative momentum. Dickensian in scope, the book includes multiple story lines ... His enormous imagination, his storytelling gifts, and his intelligence are all on display, but this feels more like a coda to his career, if one with a still-resonant theme about family and the maternal relationship ... Irving’s fans may love this, but it’s not the place to start for anyone new to his work.
Sprawling ... Generally slow ... Irving’s writing can be painfully plain, short on imagery or elegance and long, oh so long, on repetition. But his imagination and empathy often work to charm a reader when the prose falls short. Here the consistent pleasure is an extended family whose distinctive voices deliver thoughtful messages of tolerance, understanding, and affection for those who are different. A book that will try a reader’s patience but may also reward it.
