John Irving reflects on identity, belonging and gender politics
John Irving is a writer who has historically been fearless in his focus. The American-born Irving's first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968 at the age of 26. His books have been translated into more than 35 languages. While known as a novelist, he's been an Hall of Fame wrestling coach, an English professor and an Oscar-winning screenwriter.
Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of the 1978 novel The World According to Garp. His other work includes The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany and Avenue of Mysteries.
But he still is motivated to write. Now a dual citizen of the United States and Canada, the Toronto-based Irving is back with The Last Chairlift, an epic novel about family, identity and the ghosts that haunt us all. It's about an American slalom skier who leaves that life behind after becoming pregnant with her son Adam during a competition in Colorado. Years later, Adam returns to the Aspen hotel where he was conceived to learn more about his past and identity.
Irving spoke with CBC Books about The Last Chairlift and his literary life and career.
At age 80, and with such a deep and respected bibliography, what keeps you motivated to write at this point in your career?
I want to keep living up to my expectations. I'm fortunate to have as many readers as I do and it's easy with hindsight to call my slow start as a writer fortunate.
For the writing of my first four novels — when I was not a bestseller — I was a full-time English teacher and wrestling coach. I never thought, on the evidence of the writing of those first four books, that I would ever be self-supporting. And I liked coaching wrestling. I liked teaching English.
When I was writing The World According to Garp, I resented that I had two hours a day to write, and not every day.
I thought, how much more could I do if I could write seven days a week and I didn't have these other jobs? It's easy now, at 80, to look back and say it was fortunate that I didn't have a breakout book — a bestseller with my first novel. It's because the privilege, the good luck of being self-supporting in the world of literary fiction, is something I don't take for granted.
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That character, and many characters in your books, have a deep social and political conscience. How do you see tolerance and social mores evolving over the years in literature and the real world?
I never thought Roe v. Wade was safe.
When I wrote The World According to Garp, a novel about of the days when abortion used to be illegal, I had friends who told me that it was a nice historical novel but it's over now [due to Roe v. Wade]. I said I didn't write this novel because I believe it will never be over. I wanted to demonstrate this is what it's like when you take a woman's right to this away.
Most Americans don't know their own country's history of abortion. They don't know that abortion was, from the earliest days of Plymouth, Mass., in the 1620s. They don't realize that for more than two centuries abortion was legal and available through the first trimester, before they took it away.
Most Americans don't know their own country's history of abortion.
I'm never happy when the political backwardness of my birth country can be reliably counted upon when the backlash to everything progressive is once again in our faces.
I will simply say that. I wasn't wrong in The Last Chairlift, to make my political targets the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and the Republican Party.
Speaking of The Last Chairlift, it is set in America, in Colorado. But you live in Canada now. Years ago, you mentioned in an interview that, as an American writer, you weren't sure you would be as in touch with your subject if you lived somewhere else. But now you do live somewhere else. How are you staying rooted in the context of writing this story set in America, living in Canada now?
My decision to come to Canada is entirely because my wife is Canadian. My becoming a Canadian citizen isn't a political statement. It's a love story. I even felt lucky in the Canadian immigration process [to be a dual citizen]. There were a lot of people going through that process with me who would not have it as easy a time as I did. That was a learning experience too. I was really glad to have it.
I think political guilt has always worked very constructively with me. My Vietnam novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, was written in part because of how both how unwitting and how lucky I was to evade the moral decision that so many of my fellow Americans had to make about that war.
My becoming a Canadian citizen isn't a political statement. It's a love story.
But I got a girl pregnant, we got married and had the baby. The senior officer in my division said that I was effectively dismissed because the fathers were ineligible for combat.
Well, I was so naive I felt disappointed. I didn't even know I was lucky. Later, when many of the boys I'd gone to school with had died in Vietnam, I felt guilty for having dodged that bullet. I was young enough and out of it enough to think that an opportunity for me as a writer was lost, not having the opportunity to see a war.
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In The Last Chairlift, there are themes of identity and belonging — themes that you revisit often. The novel feels autobiographical. Are these questions that you are still working through all these years later by way of fiction?
In the area of my novels that could probably most broadly be described as family sagas, and surely The Last Chairlift is in that. There are many beginnings to these stories that have a similar autobiographical framework.
The small town and boarding school where I came from are familiar to many of my readers. Even the family circumstances, intentionally, are similarly familiar: the elusive, evasive or secretive mother who has a past that she's not entirely open to divulging; and the absent or missing or unknown biological father.
I like playing with these familiar premises. Looks like, sounds like — the same old autobiographical roots. The town of Exeter, for example, is a fictional place but everybody knows where it is.
I wanted to turn the family upside down, so to speak, and make my first-person point of view character the most clueless guy in the room.
It's playful. What I wanted to do was set up my "straight guy" narrator as the odd duck in the family. I wanted to change the family equation around. I wanted to turn it upside down and say, "In this family, the straight guy is the queer one. It's the queer people who are the most normal, the most developed, and do the most looking after him. He's the last to learn anything."
I wanted to turn the family upside down, so to speak, and make my first-person point of view character the most clueless guy in the room.
There are the two novels of mine which The Last Chairlift most resembles. Yes, it's similar to A Prayer for Owen Meany in terms of the "missing someone" factor. The Cider House Rules connection in this novel is obvious not only because of the politics. Not that it's a family saga but the political issues are similarly forward; they're transparent. I am very reluctant to write in the first-person voice. I always prefer that third-person omniscient distance, especially in a long novel. There's more exposition in it, so it's the last choice.
If what you're looking for is the emotional impact of people who get lost, of characters who don't go the distance, the best way to feel that impact is to be in the POV of the person who's missing them. You can't match that in the third person.
I am very reluctant to write in the first person voice. I always prefer that third person omniscient distance, especially in a long novel.
Adam Brewster has more people to lose, indeed, and he loves them all. Because as queer as his family is, and everyone in it is queer around him. Well, they're also, in my estimation, loving and sensational.
That was also the point I wanted to make. Especially at a time when, in addition to the pushback against the progression of women's rights, which abortion rights represents. And especially at a time when recognition of the LGBTQ community is being shut off and denied in so many states in the United States where those state legislators themselves have turned against gay, lesbian and trans kids.
Finally, what does The Last Chairlift mean to you?
It wouldn't be the first novel of mine where more tolerance and understanding of the so-called sexual minorities is also a good idea. I'm on record as saying that Great Expectations was the novel that made me want to be a writer and to be a writer like Dickens. An old-fashioned 19th-century narrative and character driven novelist. That's what I wanted to be.
I hope you invest in who these characters are to the degree that you fear for them, to the degree that you don't want them to come to harm.
The intention of a novel by Charles Dickens is clear. This is my intention as well — to move or affect a reader emotionally. Not persuade you intellectually. I don't write novels of ideas. I write novels where I hope there is emotionally a dramatic payoff. I hope you invest in who these characters are to the degree that you fear for them, to the degree that you don't want them to come to harm.
Is this your last novel?
I know this is my last long novel. I've written other long novels, but this is the longest. I've thought of these novels as box cars in a train station, as yet uncoupled. I've been conscious of my age, so I've been trying to assess the relative difficulty of those trains left in the station.
I've thought of these novels as box cars in a train station, as yet uncoupled.
I'm not promising that [my next books] are going to be novellas. But they're going to be a heck of a lot shorter than people are used to expecting from me because I thought, "Come on, it's not going to get easier."
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
