Bokonon and on and on
In Last Last Chance, Fiona Maazel seems afraid this may be her only chance to disseminate her ideas to an audience
By Robyn Detterline
Published: April 2nd, 2008 | 9:25pm
Unrequited Love. Drug Addiction. Apocalypse. Reincarnation. Many authors have taken on these topics; few but the very brave (Stephen King, God) have ever tried to tackle them all in one treatise. With Last Last Chance, Fiona Maazel joins the ranks of these supermen with mixed success. The novel—as much an exercise in Vonnegut-worship as in big theme conquest—centers on Lucy, an addict trying to hold her family together in the midst of illness, emotional dysfunction, and the advent of Superplague. Lucy, addicted to pills and misery, can scarcely take care of herself, let alone her crack head mother, her dotty grandma, and her masochistic sister. Aware of her own defenses, Lucy doesn’t want to clean up: she’s afraid of soberly facing a life in which she neither gives nor receives love. While she may desire to have a normal family, she has neither the faculties nor hope to make progress. Still, she is resigned, and perhaps bored, so she checks herself in to a drug rehab center in Texas.
The rehab center serves as the central location of the novel’s apocalyptic scheme: while Lucy is there, Superplague hits the country, and the complex in the middle of nowhere becomes a safe haven for plague refugees. Panic, death, and mayhem ensue, all in acerbically weighted tones.
At the forefront of the numerous subplots and themes of Last Last Chance are addiction, pestilence, reincarnation, and the connections linking the three. Maazel draws interesting comparisons and deftly links them throughout the story. (For example, as Lucy weans off drugs, incidence of plague wanes.) The characters themselves are richly painted and likable despite their flaws. With her cast of minor characters, Maazel creates a quirky choir that adds to the lunacy of the leads, as well as to their relative sanity.
This is the very stuff of Vonnegut, yet the deep emotional layer of Maazel’s landscape creates a piece that is less sci-fi, more post-9/11. The threat feels realistic, and the emphasis is not on how the characters react to the apocalypse, but on how they feel about their reactions to the apocalypse. This emotional layer somewhat explains the scope of the novel, but the density of Last Last Chance is mostly due to the plethora of subplots and characters. Numerous voices and minor conflicts add to the narrative, causing Lucy’s story to be lost in the turns of plot. The members of Lucy’s local support group, the patients at the rehab center, and the reincarnated versions of characters all have stories to tell. And her relationships with her mother, her sister, her grandmother, her ex-lover, her current lover, her friends, her drugs, her God, pull her in so many directions that it’s difficult to keep up with her psychological progressions.
That Last Last Chance is an homage is no secret. As a sort of inside joke, Lucy says “someone told her to stop reading so much Kurt Vonnegut.” While Maazel adds her own flair to the style, she also tries to accomplish too much, and would have perhaps created a stronger tale had she focused her attention on the major issues and pared back the extraneous portraits and subplots best left to the reader’s imagination.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Last Last Chance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
By Fiona Maazel
352 pages
List Price: $25.00
Issue #35
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