In 'The Last Chairlift,' John Irving revisits familiar themes with a new perspective

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2022

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, NPR's Scott Simon pays best-selling author John Irving a visit in his Toronto home. Across from Irving's family photographs and slanted writing station, they discuss the writer's expansive career, the prevalence of gender and sexual politics in his novels and the newfound personal connection he can make with his characters.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaung. There's a certain skill to interviewing
0:07.2	someone late in their career. You don't want to talk too much about the past, and it's hard to talk
0:12.7	about the future, considering the realities of life and mortality and all that. But this next
0:18.1	interview weaves that line beautifully, I think. It's between NPR Scott
0:21.3	Simon and John Irving, the best-selling author behind books like The Sider House Rules. His new book,
0:27.3	The Last Chairlift, is a coming-of-age book that touches on sex and love and family, and
0:32.4	a whole lot more because the book is nearly 900 pages. And if you're a John Irving superfan,
0:37.1	and this book sounds like a lot more of the same,
0:40.5	you're not wrong.
0:41.9	Irving talks about going back to the same questions and themes again and again.
0:45.8	And to me, it just sounds like he's still looking for some answers.
0:49.3	This message comes from heavyweight.
0:51.4	Maybe you've laid awake and imagined how it could have been, how it might be,
0:56.0	but the moment to act was never right. Well, the moment is here, and the podcast making it happen
1:01.2	is Heavyweight with Jonathan Goldstein, available wherever you get podcasts.
1:06.1	Support for NPR and the following message come from the estate of Joan B. Kroc, whose bequest serves as an
1:12.3	enduring investment in the future of public radio and seeks to help NPR be the model for high-quality
1:18.8	journalism in the 21st century.
1:22.5	John Irving has written huge bestsellers, beginning with the world according to Garp,
1:27.7	and now at the age of 80, he's written his longest novel,
1:31.9	putting pen to paper like a Dickensian Scrivener on a slanted writing board.
1:37.1	I used to just write on clipboards,
	...

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