“I begin with, ‘What's the story? Who are the characters? What's going to happen to them? Where do they end up?’” Irving said.
It won’t come as a surprise to avid Irving readers to learn that “The Last Chairlift” is woven with the thread of sexual politics and an embrace of people who don’t identify as straight or cisgender.Īdam, the main character, is the only straight guy among the people “who mean the most to him, who love him the best and whom he loves back,” Irving said.Įven so, the political element comes later in the writing process, Irving said. “There's always something that's been a little compromised about her, but her pluck is kind of ingrained,” he said. That’s when he landed on a skier who wasn’t quite big enough to pick up sufficient speed in the downhill. She’s not a winning one but, rather, one with the gumption to compete anyway.
Irving wanted her to be a competitor, too. “For all these things that might be admirable, courageous about her, she has within her the capacity to take a step too far.” “The characters began the story,” he said in a Zoom interview Thursday.īefore Irving knew Ray Brewster would be a skier, he wanted her “to be a person who is almost oblivious to risks, to be a person who is courageous and independent, … someone who is unmoved by conformity or conventionality,” he said.
In fact, he didn’t even have a location in mind, as he started the book. And she remains a skier when she returns home to New Hampshire, where Adam grows up resistant to the sport that so often took his mom away to teach skiing on the mountain.īut Irving says he didn’t set out to write a story so driven by skiing. Ray didn’t get near a podium, really, but she did get pregnant in a no-strings-attached situation with a younger boy she met at Hotel Jerome. National Championships for downhill and slalom skiing in 1941. In the fictional world of Irving’s latest saga, narrator and protagonist Adam Brewster might not even exist were it not for skiing in Aspen in the 1940s.īrewster’s mother, Ray, was a slalom racer just shy of 19 years old when she rolled into town in time for the U.S. His latest book, “The Last Chairlift,” contains plenty of familiar Irving themes, plus a story of skiing, ghosts and Aspen’s Hotel Jerome that spans eight decades and almost 900 pages in sprawling Irving fashion. Author John Irving has made himself a household name for novels such as “The World According to Garp,” “The Cider House Rules” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany.”
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