The Last Chairlift

Written by John Irving

Narrated by Jacques Roy, Raquel Beattie, Cassandra Campbell and 13 more

John Irving’s fifteenth novel is “powerfully cinematic” (The Washington Post) and “eminently readable” (The Boston Globe). The Last Chairlift is part ghost story, part love story, spanning eight decades of sexual politics.

In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor.

Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Years later, looking for answers, he will go to Aspen. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts; in The Last Chairlift, they aren’t the first or last ghosts he sees.

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. A visionary voice on the subject of sexual tolerance, Irving is a bard of alternative families. In the “generously intertextual” (The New York Times) The Last Chairlift, readers will once more be in his thrall.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Oct 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781797111230

John Irving

John Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times—winning in 1980 for the novel The World According to Garp. In 1992, Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. He won the 2000 Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Irving's most recent novel is In One Person (2012).

Reviews for The Last Chairlift

[Jenny Luhr · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

It's hard to fully explain what a waste of time this book is. Such a bore.

[Leah Barton Tew · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

John Irving was one of my favorite writers until I read this book.

If you’ve read other JI books you’ll recognize his usual tropes here: parental deaths on mass transit, hotels as characters, wrestling, Exeter, females who can’t/don’t speak, transgenderism, inappropriate (but accepted) sexual behavior within families and/or with underage people, writers, women who are unusually loud during orgasm, politically-based shooting events, women who assault underage or incapacitated males for the express purpose of getting pregnant, etc. Unfortunately, even a great writer like John Irving can only trot out these plot points so many times without their becoming trite and tedious, and the fact that this book is so repetitive makes it that much worse. Clearly, Irving has run out of new ideas.

In addition, the book has long, boring passages - mostly related to “telling” movies or reading movie scripts. I also lose interest when any form of entertainment (fiction, movies, music, etc.) gets excessively political, because I feel political expression should allow for a dialogue. This book does get very political and - by nature - it is one-sided and therefore a bully pulpit.

I really lost interest and was very disappointed in the book about 1/3 of the way into it, but I try to make a point of finishing any book I start unless it’s just so badly written that it’s an insult to my intelligence. Irving is a skilled writer - no doubt - so I stuck with it, but I have to admit I almost gave up many times. I love a good, long book, but unfortunately this one was just a long book.

[Catherine Singer · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is my first John Irving book. From the reviews it appears it could only get better.
I enjoyed the storyline. I liked the characters. There were so many characters I didn’t remember which were alive and which weren’t. Maybe this was purposeful.
It was meandering, painfully repetitive in parts, and I absolutely hated the screen play sections, but I hung in there, waiting to get back into the immediate storyline.
Was he telling the story in the way that we think every day, remembering ghosts from our past among the people of our present? So many layers of lives lived at once within their own time.
Loved the family characters. The political commentary was interesting. It’s spoke a lot about our society.
It also spoke of love having no boundaries except those our society creates, the repetitiveness of humankind’s actions. What is in our genes to repeat? What are we raised to see as normal.
I have never hung in with a book like I hung in with this one. Thank God it was audible.
The readers were very good, reflecting their characters.

[Kristin DeLuca · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love John Irving and I’m thrilled he’s still writing. I just wish he’d deleted the cat murdering bit from this book.