Hugging us back in the dark: John Irving on making us care about his characters, sexual politics, and the ghosts in his new book ‘The Last Chairlift’

I follow John Irving’s lead as he picks a path through the rocks and moss of this small Canadian Shield island. We are heading to his “writing shed” which lies near the main cottage that’s been in his wife Janet’s family for years, and where they’ve spent this almost-post-COVID summer. The story is that Janet’s grandfather won the island in a poker game, although Janet says it’s a bit more complicated than that, as these things are. But it’s a good story, with its roots in the truth.

The writer from New Hampshire who became famous for his big American novels — “The World According to Garp,” “Cider House Rules,” “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” among 15 in all — has a desk that sits in front of a window overlooking Georgian Bay. A tree that echoes a Group of Seven painting, bent by the winds, clings to a rock off to the right. Apt, perhaps, as he became a Canadian citizen in 2019. The sky is clear blue, the sun reflects off the waves of Lake Huron lapping up against the shore; clean water.

Inside, hanging on the wood plank walls, are mementoes of his life and his career: the book cover from his last novel “Avenue of Mysteries,” in English and in various translations; photos of his family — his two sons and daughter and grandchildren; and a vintage poster from Aspen, Colorado marking the National Ski Championships that took place March 8-9, 1941, this last being a clue to the project he’s just finished — a book he calls his last “big” novel.

And big “The Last Chairlift” is, weighing in at almost 900 pages, almost double Herman Melville’s famous whale novel “Moby-Dick,” which figures large within this book. Irving has never made a secret of loving big 19th-century stories “where the objective of a novel was not to persuade you intellectually, but to move you to tears or laughter, or both,” he says. The objective was to persuade you emotionally. To make you care.

And to do that, you start with the characters.

“The Last Chairlift” is about a family. Not a conventional family — this is a John Irving novel, after all.

There’s Little Ray, who decides she wants to have a child and finds someone to get pregnant by, someone she won’t have to tell about the baby so she can have her “one and only” all to herself. Adam is the product of that relationship — and spends a good amount of time in the book trying to figure out who his father is. Little Ray, meantime, marries Mr. Barlow, the wrestling coach at Exeter, the private school which Adam attends in the small New England town for which the school is named. Straightforward enough, except Little Ray is a lesbian with a long-term girlfriend named Molly, who she lives with; Mr. Barlow is trans; and she only stays with him sometimes. Their marriage is unconventional but works for them.

The story takes place over the last part of the 20th century; it’s a stock-taking of sorts — from the 1940s through the 1950s, the Vietnam War and into the ’70s and sexual politics.

During the first part of “The Last Chairlift” in particular — when Adam and his cousins are growing up, and the adults are in their sexual prime — there’s a lot of messy, dirty, comic, slapstick sex. Sex that involves unexpected bodily fluids and noises and awkward couplings.

“There’s a lot of sex in this book,” I say.

“There’s a lot of making fun of sex in the book,” Irving counters. “If you think the relationships between Molly and Little Ray and the snowshoer (Mr. Barlow) are queer, Adam’s string of unfortunate girlfriends are (queer in the other sense of the word).”

The point he’s making is that the physical specifics of how people have sex don’t particularly matter. And Adam, the cis-hetero guy, is having the weirdest sex of all — in case your judgment gets in the way, in case you’re thinking they’re the odd ones.

Irving, who turned 80 earlier this year, has long been on the front lines of feminism, trans rights and reproductive rights. “I think over the years I’ve demonstrated that sexual politics are my politics … the politics of sexual identity, the politics of sexual differences, the politics of sexual intolerance that never seems to go away.”

It’s something he’s proud of. Sure, “The Cider House Rules” is the movie for which he won an Oscar for best screenplay, but he also won a Media Excellence Award, he’s quick to point out, from Planned Parenthood “for the film’s exceptional contribution to enhancing the public’s understanding of reproductive rights.”

Certainly he’s been vocal about the Trump years and the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade, about abortion rights and reproductive rights and the state of the U.S. right now.

There’s a fragility to it all; things you thought were set, that were finally resolved, can change at any time, politically and personally.

Fragility is not something that Irving has ever particularly felt. But as he was writing this book, the man who coached wrestling until age 47 and has a home gym he works out in fractured his spine while doing some exercises on a mat. He was diagnosed with osteoporosis, something that changed his own, personal view on moving within the world. “All of a sudden there’s … a new fear,” he says. “I think it had an accidental benefit to the fragile psychology that’s at work in this book.”

If you’re going to keep people turning the pages of a challenging novel, you have to spend particular attention to craft. I think of Irish author Colm Toibin’s “Nora Webster,” a book that builds itself sentence by sentence, detail after detail, a book he once described to me as very technical.

“The Last Chairlift,” too, is technical, and transparent in its craft — the references to “Moby-Dick” help explain some of the choices Irving made: the first-person narrative and the use of foreshadowing, for example.

Making Adam a first-person narrator emphasizes that intimacy. And “making Adam straight in a queer world was a way of isolating him, of emphasizing his outsiderness,” says Irving. This is a helpful trait for a writer, but also gives the character a certain uneasiness: he’s always looking to belong.

Certain characters were created, too, to drive the plot forward.

Cousin Nora, for instance, who “both as a kid and as a performer she makes a target of herself — I needed a character who would draw the hateful backwardness that is so absurdly planted in America” — hate that looks like the “Proud Boys we’ve seen on both sides of the border.”

It’s also key to build characters the reader likes.

“The more people of importance in the story … the more people you like in a story who are going to die, who you’re going to lose, the greater the emotion for the reader,” says Irving, “especially if it’s from the point of view of the person who’s lost them.”

“The Last Chairlift” is, Irving has said, “a ghost story.”

The first ghost we see is — to take a page from Dickens — the ghost of old age, the so-called “diaper man,” Adam’s grandfather who died a tragic and comic death near the beginning of the book. He makes appearances at inopportune times — at the bottom of Adam’s bed when he’s got female company — with his droopy incontinence diaper and smell of, well, s–t. Grandpa becomes a comedic device, a way of confronting old age and death no matter the indignities life might have visited on him (although Janet and Irving’s editors thought there might have been a bit too much diaper man, I’m told).

There are the ghosts, too, of Adam’s past — the young father he sees in a faded picture, the ghosts he comes across in the Hotel Jerome in Aspen, which he visits in hope of getting some clues about his father and who he is and where he belongs.

There are also the ghosts that come with Adam when he finally moves permanently to Toronto (another parallel with Irving’s own life) — the ghosts of Little Ray and Mr. Barlow who make hilarious appearances on Yonge Street or outside the Summerhill subway station.

If Irving’s done his job — made us laugh, entertained us — we care about those characters. We feel them and relate to them, no matter how unrelatable they might initially seem. We feel what they lived: the love, the discrimination, the hopes and dreams. They speak to our humanity.

It’s been a few hours and we are still talking in that lakeside writing shed as the afternoon wears on. John Irving had offered me the “comfortable” chair — the kind you’d curl up in and read for hours.

On the desk beside him he’s got another novel in the works — he’s got a few more ideas for books, just smaller ones — marked up with edits.

Irving wrote me in an email before we met up that, years ago, he was imagining the shot he wanted for cover art of “The Last Chairlift”: “It was the foremost, downhill-facing chair at the top of the Bromley Mountain in Vermont. Sunrise, before the chairlift was running. A cold morning.” In the novel he calls the image “a waiting hearse.”

The only thing we know for sure about endings is that they’re inevitable. Irving’s often written his books for the last lines (he always has the ending in mind, he says, as he’s a plot-driven writer, but he’s willing to change it if something better comes up: “It ain’t a religion”). And everything that’s come before has led us to that moment. To the last words and last ideas.

A book, like a writer, leaves a legacy. If a writer’s good and the readers open, the characters and stories might stick with you, elicit your compassion, open your mind, change your point of view.

The book was originally going to be titled “Darkness as a Bride,” from Shakespeare’s “Measure For Measure,” which acts now as an epigraph: “If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in mine arms.”

There’s no way of knowing what’s down the other side of that mountain. You might be afraid of it, the way Adam remembers, at the end of the book, being afraid as a child of the dark.

“Hug the dark, sweetie, and the dark will hug you back,” Little Ray’s ghost says to Adam before she vanishes back to whatever ghostly realm she came from.

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