The Last Chairlift was published by Simon & Schuster in 2022, Irving’s fifteenth novel and the one he announced would be his last. At over 900 pages, it is also his longest — a characteristically expansive narrative that spans decades and continents while returning to the themes that have defined his career: absent fathers, sexual fluidity, the persistence of the past, and the way love survives even the most catastrophic losses.
The novel follows Adam Brewster, a screenwriter and novelist, from his childhood in 1940s Aspen (where his mother was a ski racer) through the present day. Adam’s life is haunted — literally, in Irving’s characteristically blurred boundary between realism and the fantastic — by the ghosts of people he has loved and lost. The novel’s enormous cast includes snowmakers, transgender characters, sexual pioneers, and the ghosts who refuse to leave the living alone.
Irving’s decision to make this his final novel gives it a valedictory quality: the book feels like a summation, returning to the themes and techniques of his entire career while pushing them further than ever in terms of sexual frankness and formal ambition. Whether it succeeds as a final statement depends on the reader’s tolerance for Irving’s maximalism — his refusal to cut, his insistence on following every character’s story to its end, and his faith that emotional generosity can justify any length.
Collecting The Last Chairlift
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2022): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed first edition: $50–$150
- Without jacket: $5–$10