Typical of an Irving protagonist, Adam Brewster-who narrates the book in the first person-is more of an observer of his unconventional family life than he is an active participant in the story. An Irving loyalist can play “I Spy” throughout all 900 pages of The Last Charlift, but that broad outline above doesn’t begin to capture what makes the novel distinctive. Already, you’re sure you’ve heard this one before, and that’s without mentioning that one of the main characters is a transgender woman, or that the story involves the murder of a feminist activist by a male bigot with a rifle, or the protagonist’s stint in a German-speaking country. He attends an elite boarding school, joins the wrestling team, and grows up to be a writer. The Last Charlift is about a man who’s born in the mid-20th century to a single mother in New England. Irving, working primarily as a novelist and sometimes as a screenwriter, seems to have taken this idea literally. Rainer Werner Fassbinder once remarked that every great director has only one subject, and ultimately makes the same film over and over again. 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. Then again, Irving’s novels have seemed like “greatest hits” collections for years now.
This isn’t to say that the 80-year-old writer won’t go on to publish some wonderful novels of modest length, but 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. It was also dull and thinly conceived, devoid of the immersive quality that makes most of his work so compelling.
Irving’s shortest novel in the last 25 years, The Fourth Hand, was a deliberate attempt on his part to write an accessible comedy. Since his fourth novel, The World According to Garp, was published in 1978 to significant acclaim, he’s specialized in telling expansive stories, often tracing characters’ journeys from birth to death and chronicling the histories of the places in which they live. John Irving has said that The Last Chairlift will be his last long novel.
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