Reading John Irving

 John Irving fans know this: to read him is to commit. His books are long and involved, many subplots, many characters who change over the course of 400-500-600 pages. The reader must be in for the long haul and like it. There's no reading Irving if you don't like his work or are just "meh" about it. Needless to say, I am a fan and I have liked every one of his novels, some of them I have read more than once.

But his latest, "The Last Chairlift" clocks in at close to 900 pages!!!  That's not a commitment, that's a kind of craziness.  Seriously, I took it out of the library, kept it past it's due date, returned it and put it back on my request list to read the second half.  Irving's books aren't quick reads, either. They do not accommodate skimming. Every time you try to skip past a paragraph or two you realize, at paragraph three, that you missed something crucial and need to backtrack.  So you don't skip ahead too much.

But the writing and the plot and the characters! It's been a while since I've read his other novels (he hasn't written one in seven years)  but the characters in this one are so shimmering and almost ethereal and yet completely real and alive.  And beguiling and frustrating and maddening and joyful.  

The story begins in the 1940's, in Colorado, at a real hotel, the Hotel Jerome, now a luxury auberge hotel.  Things happen there, ghosts are present, lives change. The story moves to the East Coast, to New Hampshire (of course, Irving is always going back to his roots) and New York and other locations but the Hotel Jerome appears in the book many times.

A lot of John Irving's novels revolve around political themes (war, injustice, civil rights) and there is always a sexual component to them as well. He champions, in  his novels, the queer and trans world and the struggles of groups outside the "norm," whatever that might be. This novel is no different. The main characters are straight, bisexual, gay, lesbian, trans and questioning.  Just like the real world. A lot of the story takes place in the 1980's, when Reagan was President and ignored the AIDS epidemic, and it continues until present day.  In 900 pages there's time to span 80 years!

"The Last Chairlift" is quite a tale and I enjoyed it immensely.  It makes me want to re-read some of his older novels but not quite yet. There are too many new novels out there in the literary world and too little time.  I'll go back and revisit older ones when I am too old to go to the library and pick up new books. But if you like Irving, you will like this book.