The Last Resort by Alison Lurie

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Novelist Alison Lurie hooked me on page one with the statement that Jenny followed her husband’s instructions, “as she had done for a quarter century.” On the following page, the impression of their marital relationship is reinforced when we learn that Jenny met her much older husband, working “while she waited to see what would happen next in her life.” I cringed to learn that the first time they lunch together she recognizes the popular science writer Wilkie Walker as “someone she could, even should, devote her life to.” Though her mother cautions her that by marrying someone much older, a person risks never quite growing up, twenty-one-year-old Jenny weds a man her mom’s age. They happily raise two children as she helps him with his research, scheduling, editing and much more.

Crisis hits when Wilkie reaches 70. Only forty-six, Jenny notices how he’s losing his enthusiasm, and persuades him to spend the winter in Key West.

She hopes a warm vacation will lift his spirits and help him finish his latest book. Instead of relaxing in the warm climate, Wilkie becomes cold and unreachable, causing his wife to assume he no longer loves her. Meanwhile, chaos is erupting on the island. After a jellyfish bites Jenny, a middle-aged innkeeper befriends her, with unexpected results. Jacko, a local gardener, has just been diagnosed with AIDS, and his mother — a fellow green thumb — is flying in to visit.

But Mum arrives with Jacko’s annoying cousin in tow. Barbie Mumpson (the name says it all) is feeling lost, confused and nearly suicidal after leaving her philandering politician husband. In the midst of all this, Barbie’s mother shows up, marshalling her manipulative skills to finesse her daughter into doing what she wants. Then there’s a real suicide, and another death that dramatically changes Jacko’s life. No wonder Molly, his eighty-one year-old neighbour, is left ruefully telling herself “I’m too old for this.”

Indeed, on Key West, most people are old, earning it the epithet used in the title. The full-time retirees have little patience for those who flock there in tourist season, adults crowding into the shops and restaurants “dressed like children at play.” Lurie paints a vivid portrait of the island, conjuring up its delightful beaches along with the lush and colourful flora, including the frangipani, the poinciana, the orchid trees and gumbo limbo tree (yes, it’s a real plant). She also evokes the darker side: tasteless costly decor, snobbery and homophobia, sky-rocketing real estate prices, public drunkenness downtown, and the plethora of T-shirt stores that serve as fronts to launder drug money.

While her themes are serious, Lurie plays with language in a way that makes us smile, as we must when we learn that Jacko has “an intermittent ability to read minds.” We laugh aloud when a foolish middle-aged poet tells Jenny he needs her more than her husband does, adding, “I’ve got so many projects—Besides, I need you as a woman.” We even have to smile when we read that someone is “killing time until the time came to kill himself.” When Barbie falls in love with the idea of saving the endangered manatee, we can only laugh at her corresponding indifference to plants, which she sees only as “habitat and fodder.”

The novel raises all kinds of interesting questions. Is it possible to build actual rapport with people by simply echoing the last words they’ve said, as the ex-therapist advises? How are we to recognize our aggrandizing self-delusions? As we age, how much should we concern ourselves with our legacy? Why do famous people’s ideas automatically go out of date when new ones come into vogue, and what is the plight of people who decline to subscribe to prevailing views? Might fate really intervene to save us from our own foolishness?

Molly, the wise and kind elderly witness, watches the antics of the other characters from the sidelines, and thinks about what she sees. Her late husband’s views resonate. Molly recalls how he though it “better not to get involved with noisy, combative people,” if, of course, it can be “honourably avoided.” In like manner, “the same principle applie[s] to politics, and to noisy, combative countries.”

This cleverly constructed novel reveals the inner worlds of an array of vastly different characters. Though we’re tempted to take sides in their conflicts with one another, Lurie will not allow us an easy way out; she makes it difficult for readers to casually judge or dismiss the people who seem at first glance to be deeply unappealing. As the characters develop, readers are obliged to see the haste of our own judgments, and allow that nobody is entirely villainous. Even the redoubtable Republican Myra Fudd, whose name conjures up her cartoon namesake, has a backstory that lends her a certain sympathy: she had to forego attending law school because “nice Christian girls didn’t do that back in the fifties.”

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But isn’t every relationship meaningful?