David Schwinghammer’s Reviews > The Last Chairlift > Status Update

Irving addresses the AIDS epidemic through one of his minor characters.

Bob hope jokes about AIDS at the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. It was particularly risqué.

There's a fellow writer in line after Adam's reading. Her name is Wilson. He imagines having sex with her.

Adam's friends, Nora and Em, do routines at a performance venue called the Gallows. It was getting harder to be funny about anything already at the end of the 1970's. And they called themselves Two Dykes, One Who Talks.

Adam's mother would stand close to the person she was talking to and hold his or her wrists.

The kindergarten man's sister sends him back to preschool, where she thinks his mental development stopped. Irving must have been sniffing glue when he wrote this stuff. How am I still reading It?

Paul Goode, a character in the novel, is a filmmaker. THE KINDERGARTEN MAN is one off his works. In the film, two men, or a man and a woman, have been targeting kindergarten classes with children from wealthy families. They take them for ransom.

Irving is all over the place in this book. I didn't remember him doing that in the past.

Grandma dies reading MOBY DICK.

MOBY DICK frightens the River Benders, but Nana loves it.

Adam's aunts, Martha and Abigail, move his grandmother River Bend, an old folks home, but she has the last laugh.