“That’s when you know the growing up has happened, though you still have more growing up ahead of you - I certainly did.” “When you keep secrets from people you love, you don’t sleep as soundly as a child,” says Adam, a novelist, screenwriter and close contemporary of Irving, who himself has told of being sexually abused by a woman when he was 11. Then the thrilling and anxious descent into secrecy. In a page or two, Adam - named for the Bible’s first man, narrating in the first person - rapid-shuffles through all the conflicted feelings of an incest victim: curiosity, fright, confusion, indignation, loyalty. An awful lot happens to Adam Brewster, the protagonist of John Irving’s new novel, “The Last Chairlift.” Indeed, it would hardly be an Irving novel if it weren’t stuffed - sometimes overstuffed, like one of those sofas with the springs coming out at odd angles.īut the main event is probably when Adam’s athletic, unmarried mother, Rachel “Little Ray” Brewster, straddles him, age 13, in bed, presses his shoulders down to the mattress and gives him the kind of “lawless” kiss she’s just planted on a prospective new boyfriend.
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