The Last of Something
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Synopsis | Questions for Susan | Questions for Reading Groups
Synopsis
As Shotsie Brooks prepares her mother’s beach cottage for a weekend of guests, close friends since college twenty years earlier, she senses something sadly final about their gathering. Perhaps it’s summer’s end, or melancholy brought on by her recent hysterectomy. Perhaps it’s her husband’s incomprehensible white collar crime, or her mother’s increasing senility, or memories of Ian — loveable, incorrigible Ian — that the setting evokes for Shotsie. Perhaps it’s the sad shape of the cottage itself, past its prime and suffering the weatherbeaten effects of a previous hurricane. And nearly as soon as the women arrive -- before the men, of course, to make the beds and buy the groceries--comes the news of a hurricane growing and blowing somewhere off the coast of Cuba.
But the approaching storm barely affects Shotsie and Bess and Claire. They walk and they talk and they sun and they shop. They know each other intimately, traits and faults, assets and liabilities, histories and personalities. They know each other’s children and husbands and sex lives and clothing and regrets. They’re forty; a hurricane doesn’t strike fear into them. What strikes fear into them are falling knees and bank balances, alcoholism and exclusion, non compos mentis parents, and children who are over-developed or suffering from low self-confidence and worms.
They wait too for their husbands’ arrivals, for the hurricane’s arrival, and—without openly admitting it—for Ian. Because just as Bess and Shotsie and Claire share ailments and hypocrisies and histories, they share Ian. Funny, charming, handsome Ian, who’s been a significant figure in each of their lives and played some role in their history. The same Ian who has somehow betrayed them with marriage to Nina, pregnant with Ian’s child. But even that is forgivable if only Ian will come. He’s the sidekick, the pal, the old boyfriend whom they dote on and indulge and amuse. But their attachment and affection for Ian is more than that. It’s unhealthy and obsessive, and each woman is privately, silently aware of this fact too. Yet they don’t tell everything.
By Sunday every guest will be in some way injured physically and mentally. One woman will leave her husband, one will hurt and humiliate hers, another will commit even more deeply to hers. And a single brutal remark during one of the lengthy congenial dinners they’ve all so anticipated will break them apart forever even as it draws them closer. Shotsie and Claire and Bess will re-evaluate their devotion to Ian and abandon him.
Perhaps.
Over the long beach weekend, the sweet sad last of something unnameable, the three women come to terms with past loves, present marriages, and the essential nature of their friendship. The Last of Something is a witty meditation, a sophisticated elegy, and a tender love song. It’s concerned with memory, the dependencies and vulnerability and ambivalence of marriage and children, the comradeship of women. The novel’s enduring lesson is the bittersweet necessity of holding fast while letting go.
Questions for Susan
What prompted you to write The Last of Something?
As with all my novels, The Last of Something represents a confluence of inspirations. Someone I’d known since college got divorced, and in the aftermath I watched as several folks--including myself--invited him to dinner, included him at social gatherings, and commiserated in general, as though each of us had a particular claim to him. Why did we behave like that?
I’d was also re-organizing my photograph albums and had come across many pictures from once-upon-a-time houseparties at the beach, or (in fact) tubing down the Nantahala River. One picture in particular held me, of six or seven of us sitting on a porch with our legs hoisted up to the railing, and I wondered, What’s become of us? How are we different now —married, children, older —from the smiling, innocent twenty-somethings we were then? It was a sobering thought.
I’d also reached that point in life where Shotsie, Claire and Bess have found themselves: on the brink of middle age, when you comprehend that This is my life. For better or worse, this is it, warts and all. It’s not a sudden, shocking realization, but an awareness. A dawning. The realization isn’t depressing, but it’s nevertheless tinged with melancholy.
Above all, I wanted to write about things—events, people, places, memories, objects—we can’t let go of, and why.
Out of Shotsie, Claire, and Bess, who are you?
None and all. Like Claire I’m an ENTJ organizer who occasionally, and probably annoyingly, spouts quotes from literature. Like Shotsie I’m sentimental, and can instantly connect a song lyric with a time in my life, even a certain afternoon. I’m the least like Bess, but I did go to boarding school, and know whereof she came! (It was a boarding school roommate whose mother sent the letters full of advice, including “A girl’s best friend is a good reputation,” which my old roommate and I still laugh about today.)
Like Bess and Claire and Shotsie, I lived in a sorority house during college, and the room I describe is precisely how my five-girl room at the Pi Phi house looked. Their traits and tics, expressions and attitudes, flaws and assets-- the anorexia mindset, refusing to fly with a husband, wearing the “geezer shoes advertised in The New Yorker,” breaking men’s starched shirt pockets, reading The National Enquirer--all originated with women friends I know and love.
Did the novel flow along, or were there changes?
Even through five and six revisions, The Last of Something’s essential story and single weekend setting remained the same. The novel was initially much longer, however. Each couple brought their children, and there were scenes of a restaurant dinner and an amusement park visit, but I was afraid all those names and ages might be difficult for a reader to keep track of.
The first drafts of the novel featured an omniscient narrator instead of Shotsie’s first person voice, as though God was looking down on these foolish humans and making the occasional wry comment about their behavior. I eventually decided that a reader feels closer to characters when she’s one of them, through a first person voice.
I’ve heard you say The Last of Something is your favorite of the books you’ve written. Why?
I love its tone, which is partly nostalgia and partly a comprehension of what has already taken place--what’s been lost or forfeited both intentionally and unconsciously. By the end of the weekend, Shotsie and Claire and Bess have lost a kind of innocence-- relinquished a reverence for their youth, when all things seemed possible--and they’ve lost and relinquished Ian, who they knew, deep down, they never had anyway. In the grand scheme of marriage and children and their futures, the hurts, like the injuries the characters sustain during the weekend, are minor, not life-threatening.
And I love the book’s bittersweet message, the elements of gentle regret and acceptance, and the essential unity of the women. Because even if Ian has been tarnished, Shotsie and Claire and Bess have each other. No matter what has been lost or destroyed or eroded, a current continues to run beneath the histories and the memories and the hurts and the disillusions and everyday banalities of domesticity. That current is what they have together: their friendship.
(WARNING! Spoiler alert!)
Did you know from the beginning that Ian would never arrive?
Yes. How could he? No matter how I might have portrayed him, Ian the character could never have lived up to the Ian in Shotsie and Claire and Bess’s mind and memories. Or the reader’s vision of him, either. At one point in the writing, I nearly had the women glimpse Ian on the other side of the interstate median as he’s finally driving toward the beach and they’re fleeing the hurricane’s arrival. . . but no. It’s not necessary for either Ian or the hurricane to arrive: the women and the couples and the tradition of their gatherings are forever altered regardless.
Susan's Questions for Reading Groups
- What does “something” in the novel’s title refer to?
- Do you believe, as Shotsie states, that women “lie like rugs” when the topic turns to how they lost their virginity? If so, do you think that modesty, or secrecy, still holds for the current generation of young women? If not, do you agree with the TA’s statement, “No one cares how anyone loses their virginity”?
- Shotise muses that each of the three women experienced a situation where Ian saved or loved or ruined her. It’s no accident that each woman also has a fantasy, an issue with her mother, an issue with her husband, and an issue with a child. Do you remember these?
- Do you think Ian remembered or realized that it was Shotsie with whom he had sex on the beach long ago?
- What do you think about Shotsie’s utter cruelty to Eric when he wades out of the water without his bathing trunks, an intentional humiliation that makes even her friends gasp?
- Though Laurence becomes the villain by uttering the words that destroy the weekend’s dynamics, he’s also a victim. How? Nina as well is both victim and villain. How?
- What does Shotsie’s thought at the story’s conclusion: “And me, I’m--” signify?
- What’s in your bookshelf or closet or jewelry box that correlates to Shotsie’s leather choker and white linen knife-pleated skirt and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; an object that represents a time now vanished? Don’t lie to me, I know it’s there.