At eighty years old, John Irving assures that he does not have much left to write and is convinced that L’último telecadira (Edicions 62, Tusquets in Spanish) will be his last long novel, since it is around a thousand pages -960 in the Catalan edition, 1,056 in Spanish. “It’s not a farewell at all, I already have 14 chapters of a novel and I work every day all day, I hope to publish two or three more”, says the author via video conference. “It’s the last of the long ones, but I have no intention of stopping,” he insists.
His new book traces a fresco through the American 20th century based on the life of Adam Brewster, who narrates it in the first person. His mother, a skier who did not become a professional competitor but was a ski instructor in Alpen, where he was conceived when she was 18 years old. Adam, now octogenarian, settles in the same Hotel Jerome, where he encounters ghosts he does not expect. “Ghosts are the furthest I can go in the so-called spirit world. I’m not religious or a believer, but ghosts have credibility. Rational people, who I do not think are likely to see, have had experiences connected with it, and I am very disappointed that I have not had any, and that I have been for years to the Hotel Jerome, but have not seen never the ghosts others see there. I tried, but they didn’t appear”, confesses Irving, and remembers that there had already been ghosts in his other novels.
For Irving, in fact, “The Last Chairlift is about that, it’s written from the perspective of someone who will be rewarded with the opportunity to see his mother and husband as ghosts, because he misses them when they are no longer there”.
The novel also pays tribute to some of his favorite writers, especially Herman Melville – Adam’s grandmother read Moby Dick in its entirety during his childhood, and he returns to the book often – and Charles Dickens. “They are the influences I had at 15 or 17, when I first imagined myself as a writer, a novelist creating a certain kind of narrative driven by characters and action towards an end, which it came to me directly from Melville. I had these old-fashioned models in my head when I was still a teenager, they were the writers I wanted to imitate, not the contemporaries, and my literary tastes have not changed.” Irving goes further and says that “I would never have imagined that this would make me famous, and if I had chosen other models like Hemingway, Faulkner or Fitzgerald I might not even be a writer”. “Success for me was like a luxury, because my expectation was that it would be totally ignored”, he points out.
Like his narrator, Irving defines himself as a mediocre skier – despite the fact that both he and his family have practiced the sport often and two of his grandsons are even part of the United States team in acrobatic skiing – he has studied at the same university under the wrestling program and being cis heterosexual he is an ally of the LGBTI community. This is also why the book is a complaint: “If women’s rights are treated as if they were a minority, how will they treat LGTBI people? This has always mattered to me”, explains the writer, who has two gay brothers and a trans daughter. “Fascism is coming back, but the problem is not only Trump, because the people who support him have always been there and now they have a spokesperson – he assures -. The US is more divided and polarized than with the Vietnam War.
