Stepping-off places
John Irving '61 opens up about his new novel, his tribute to an Exonian war hero, and his last tattoo.
In my recent correspondence with John Irving ’61 (via email and a phone call that lasted almost two hours), it was difficult separating the author from Adam Brewster, the narrator of his latest novel, The Last Chairlift. Taming this conflation, trying to keep these voices in their own corners, was harder than I thought it would be.
I was feeling like a hypocrite, too. Though I retired from Exeter’s English Department in June, I had been bludgeoning my students for decades with Vladimir Nabokov’s mantra for good readers: “We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world ... having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know.”
Whatever you assume about skiing and ski culture, let it go when you read Chairlift. Secure your boots to your bindings and enjoy negotiating the intertwining trails of Adam’s quests. Whether he’s searching for his father’s identity, nudging into place the puzzle pieces of his skier mother’s evolving love life or his own, or brooding over the ghosts of Aspen’s Hotel Jerome, it would be a shame to project our own experience onto the narrative’s screen or try to decode the artist’s life there.
We must surrender to the story. Which is hard to do if a chunk of it is hunkered on a setting the reader knows well. Like Exeter, for instance. If you’re a devoted Irving fan and have spent time with The Cider House Rules, A Widow for One Year, The Hotel New Hampshire, The World According to Garp, the more recent Avenue of Mysteries, or any of his 14 previous novels, you might appreciate a few echoes in The Last Chairlift (e.g., wrestling!). But Irving, who turned 80 last March, is an author who can conjure a distinct world upon what we believe are the foundations of the familiar —even if we can identify the thematic and topical watermarks of his previous fictions, especially while reading the book in the very town he’s describing.
“Fiction writers like what we call truthful exaggeration. When we write about something that really happened — oral most happened, could have happened — we just enhance what happened. Essentially, the story remains real, but we make it better than it truly was, or we make it more awful — depending on our inclination.” This is the voice of writer/narrator Adam Brewster, so you get my point about authorial ambiguity, which only intensifies in the stitched together conversation that follows.
Reading this novel, just shy of 900 pages, in two and a half weeks was a full-time job, especially when anticipating dialogue with its author. I loved every word, every minute of it. Not only the gravitational pull of my empathy for Irving’s characters and being subsumed by a tangled plot and historical commentary, but its patterns and refrains, its almost Homeric epithets. Epic is not an exaggeration for the author’s heroic management of language and scope. Like Adam says, “Unrevised, real life is just a mess.”
Ralph Sneeden: Early in our correspondence, I betrayed my dread of not being able to finish your book before our first phone conversation.
John Irving: What a blow it must be to your retirement — to be reading a novel longer than [Charles Dickens’] Bleak House. My Chairlift is still shorter than David Copperfield (barely). That said, it’s a relief to know that Chairlift really will be my last long novel. I know the approximate length of the boxcars in the train station, the novels not yet coupled to an engine. I’ve been trying to write the longest trains first — either the longest or the most difficult, for reasons other than their length. It looks like shorter trains from now on. I’ve always imagined dying at my desk, midsentence. I can accept dying in my sleep, only because it would be less of a nuisance for my wife. I’m not saying I’m going to become a novella man overnight, but that’s the direction I’m going in.
You’ve written about Exeter before, sometimes in disguise, indirectly. But this novel calls Exeter by name. Did this most recent fictional foray back to the culture of the school in the mid-20th century generate any unanticipated revelations, memories?
Nothing unanticipated. The farther I get from being the faculty brat I was lucky to be, the more free I feel to take liberties with what happened to me. The surroundings feel autobiographical, and some of the core relationships to the school are autobiographical — like the faculty-brat connection, like the townie connection. I like to use my autobiography as a stepping-off place ... to make something sound grounded in the real, in the actual. Then, when the exaggerations commence, you’ll think it’s all real. What develops from these familiar circumstances never happened to me. ... Sometimes I change the name of Exeter, but there’s a familiar small town and a boarding school with an insider-outsider student population.