John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time-among them, The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules.

In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts in The Last Chairlift, they aren't the first or the last ghosts he sees.

Years later, looking for answers, Adam will go to Aspen. Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. (Oct.John Irving, one of the world's greatest novelists, returns with his first novel in seven years-a ghost story, a love story, and a lifetime of sexual politics. Agents: Dean Cooke, Cooke McDermid, and Janet Turnbull, Turnbull Agency. His enormous imagination, his storytelling gifts, and his intelligence are all on display, but this feels more like a coda to his career, if one with a still-resonant theme about family and the maternal relationship: “We’re alone in the way we love our mothers, or in the way we don’t.” Irving’s fans may love this, but it’s not the place to start for anyone new to his work.

Along the way, Irving chronicles American society from the 1950s to roughly the present, focused on feminism and sexual intolerance. Nora, an outspoken lesbian cousin who’s a victim of sexual violence, also plays a significant role. Dickensian in scope, the book includes multiple story lines, notably the complex love life of Adam’s lesbian mother, Little Ray, a ski instructor who marries a man who will identify as a woman. The search for Adam’s father’s identity provides a thriller element, but it never generates much narrative momentum. This overblown and underplotted behemoth of a novel from Irving ( The World According to Garp) follows the idiosyncratic journey to adulthood of Adam, an illegitimate child born and raised in New England who becomes a writer.

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