Customer Reviews (30) 
A Very Good Book
I think the book is a total success.It's full of great writing that flows easily.The characters are interesting and sympathetic.It's also very amusing and informative.I cared much about the characters and was very pleased with the ending.Alison Lurie is an excellent writer.I hope to read everything she's written.
A gorgeous, funny read
I can't believe the other reviews of this wonderful book! It's my absolute favourite of Lurie's - yes, it is arguably her lightest offering but I simply love it.
Set in lush, sultry Key West, it's a sort of love story set amongst academic types, bored housewives, gay handymen and a world famous naturalist who thinks he has terminal cancer.
I love the way the story jumps forward in great leaps, often coming back later to fill in detail. Nobody in this book is totally likeable, but they grow on the reader. My favourite character is the evil Republican aunt who flies in kick everybody's ass. Repellent yet oddly endearing!
There are plenty of coincidences and contrivances, and most of the characters misunderstand each other at some point. It's very satisfying when everybody gets to say their piece. I'd have liked to see more of Jacko, the handyman/ gardener whose house forms the centre of events, but that's a small quibble.
I've read this book many times over and it pleases every time. Absolute comic perfection from the queen of the genre.
A Nice Read
I was surprised at the number of one and two star reviews here. I picked this up in a second-hand store (It may no longer be in print?) a couple years ago and it's been sitting on a dusty bookshelf ever since, waiting for me. (Books are good like that. They're very patient.) I came across it again about a week ago during a mild fit of cleaning (Fairly rare with me.) and decided to give it a try. And liked it a lot. The writing is clean and clear and reads well and the characters are well thought out and likable. The story covers some serious topics; illness and aging and the fact that we're all heading toward the end of our lives; but it never bogs down and the ending is ultimately hopeful. (And I do like happy endings.) It does treat homosexuality with a lot of sympathy so if you're bothered by that you might want to skip this. Otherwise I'd absolutely recommend it. This is the first thing I've read by Alison Lurie but certainly not the last.
She'scertainly no Jane Austen
There are too many blurbs on the cover and inner pages, at least one of which compared her to Jane Austen. That naturally made me hate the reviewer. Jane Austen is one of the greatest authors to ever put pen to paper. If you compare a modern author to her, I will hate you, and perhaps I'll feel bitter toward the author you're praising. The book sat on my shelf for about four months, at least, before I stumbled upon it again and was able to give it a fair shake. Short-term memory loss has its advantages.
I love an author with a cause, a conscience, a theme, a message. We have far too few of them in this world. But no reader likes to be preached at, even if he agrees with the author. Does anybody disagree with 99 Luftballoons? No. Does anybody want to hear it? No. I rest my case.
I used to build stories around "messages" myself. But then I got old. There's no message that you, as an author, can give a reader that he or she hasn't already thought, read, and/or written. Your themes should come up in the course of your story, as casual conversation, or else you should make those themes integral and CREDIBLE plot points. Drama not melodrama, and entertainment not sermons. You can't start with a message or a theme. It just kinda happens as you tell a great story. Or you have to make it look that way when it's not that way at all, if you're a true master. Lurie means well, but she eschews speaking softly in favor of the big stick.
Chapter one, we meet the naturalist author. I know a few people who would eat a spotted owl and laugh about it, some in my very own family, but for the most part we've accepted that nature is good. And this character, aged 70, worries that his celebrity has done more harm than good to his cause, and he's become irrelevant, and if not for his loving wife he'd just kill himself. That's a fair enough conflict. His wife, who has dedicated 25 years of her life to doing all the non-writer crap that writers must endure, so that hubby can just write, knows he's got some sort of internal struggle but is doing the all-too-human self-delusion trick about it. I think that's all boring to the non-authors of the world, but it's also fair enough. It happens that way sometimes.
Chapter two, we meet some folks who, I presume, will come into conflict with the folks in chapter one. Their cause is that homophobes are bad. I don't disagree. Then they make the classic mistake of misportraying (I think) the famous author in chapter one as a homophobe and hating him for it. We meet a man with HIV -- I've written about one myself -- and a lesbian -- I've written about several myself and accidentally married one. And as this chapter draws to a not-so-gripping cliffhanger, that's the conflict. That's all we have, aside from some proselytizing, every bit of which I agree with, which I could write better, and which is not why I read. I've read thousands of novels, folks, not counting textbooks. Do you really think I haven't read all this before? You have, haven't you? You could write it for TV if not for the writers' strike.
After reading 25 of 250 pages, putting me firmly into my "10% rule" country, I find it hard to care what will happen to these characters. They're flat. They, and their problems, bore. Plus, in both chapters, the author is very guilty of telling instead of showing. I will NOT say that you should only read this book "as a last resort haha," because Lurie deserves better than that. She can sure put sentences together, and paragraphs, and pages, and make them all easy enough to read, but if I may paraphrase Raymond Chandler, she doesn't hear the music. She also hasn't engaged my interest. Or yours. She's engaged her own interest, unlike most so-called authors, but that's only a start. Work harder if you want readers, Alison. I think you can.
Oh, and the cover blurbs also mention that she's won a Pulitzer Prize. I'm at a loss for words.
Save the Manatee
The title refers to Key West, Florida, which is the "last resort" both in the literal, geographical sense in that it is the southernmost part of the continental United States, at the far end of a long chain of islands, and also in the metaphorical sense in that it is a place where people (including several of the characters in the novel) go to start a new life when they have tried everything else.
The main characters are Wilkie Walker and his wife Jenny who travel to Key West for a winter break. Wilkie is a retired academic and scientist from a New England university. Although he is much older than his wife (he is seventy, she in her mid-forties) they have had a long and successful marriage. At the time of their Florida vacation, however, their relationship is under strain. Unknown to Jenny, Wilkie is convinced that he is suffering from terminal cancer and has resolved to commit suicide. He wants his death, however, to be thought an accident, and has decided to drown himself while swimming in the sea. (The title "The Last Resort" may also have some reference to Wilkie's planned suicide). All Jenny has noticed, however, is that her husband has become withdrawn and remote and she has concluded that he no longer loves her. Indeed, she convinces herself on very flimsy evidence that he is having an affair, and she begins a sexual relationship with Lee Weiss, the lesbian owner of a women-only boarding house.
In this novel Alison Lurie makes use of the device of recurring characters, a device used by other novelists, most famously Balzac. Her previous novel, "The Truth About Lorin Jones" was also partially set in Key West, and Lee Weiss and her boarding house also play an important part in that book. Two other characters from the same book, Polly Alter and Garrett Jones, are briefly mentioned. The Walkers meet an acquaintance, the poet Gerald Grass, who makes an unsuccessful attempt to seduce Jenny. Grass was one of Janet's housemates in "Real People"; another, Leonard Zimmern, appears at the end (it turns out he is Lee's cousin) and a third, Kenneth Foster, is mentioned. Wilkie was a lecturer at Convers College, the university featured in "Love and Friendship". It would appear that Glory Green, the young actress in "The Nowhere City", never made it in Hollywood as she reappears here as a tour guide.
The book was written in the late nineties. Today, less than ten years on, there is a tendency to look back at the Clinton years as a quiet time in American history, the interval between the fall of Communism and the 9/11 attacks when it was possible to talk about the "end of history". Nevertheless, the period had its own anxieties, and this book deals with two of them, AIDS and the environment. There is a sub-plot about Perry Jackson, an HIV-positive homosexual and the three female relatives, his mother, his formidable Aunt Myra and his cousin Barbie, unhappily married to an ambitious congressman, who come to visit him. (Barbie is the woman whom Jenny wrongly believes to be Wilkie's mistress).
Wilkie has acquired fame as a writer and broadcaster on natural history and has become an icon of the American conservation movement. His anxieties about life are not confined to the state of his health; he is also depressed by the degradation of the environment and the lack of success enjoyed by campaigners like himself in trying to preserve it. There are frequent references to environmental issues; the campaign to save the Florida manatee plays an important part in the book. The environmental themes, however, are not dealt with in a party-political way. We tend to think of the "green" cause as being a liberal one, but Wilkie is in most matters a social and political conservative, whereas Lee, a committed feminist and in all other respects a right-on liberal, has no interest in the natural world and holds views about the environment (jobs and the economy are more important than saving some threatened creature) that would not seem out of place in President Bush's cabinet.
Some of the characters do not seem convincing. I was surprised when Ms Lurie informs us that both Perry and Barbie are supposed to be in their late thirties; Perry comes across like a twenty-something, and Barbie like a neurotic teenager. Perry, who has a predilection for anonymous sex with handsome strangers, seemed too close to the image of the gay man as rampantly promiscuous (an early eighties stereotype that had become outdated by the late nineties). More importantly, Ms Lurie was never able to make convincing one of the central themes of the book, the lesbian relationship between Jenny and Lee. She failed to convince me that a woman in Jenny's position- one who had previously been exclusively heterosexual and who had been married for over twenty years- would enter into a relationship with another woman because she believed her husband was having an affair. (A relationship between Jenny and Gerry Grass might have been more plausible).
Nevertheless, I felt that many of the reviewers on this page (ten of whom only gave the book one star) were being unfair to the author. Despite its serious themes (death, suicide, terminal illness, environmental degradation) there is plenty of black or ironic humour, especially in the scenes featuring Wilkie (the book's best-realised character) whose attempts to commit suicide are continually frustrated- by a chance meeting with Grass, by bad weather, by another suicide. As with other works by this author, there is also plenty of satire, much of it directed at the fiercely conservative political activist Myra. Politically, Myra is opposed to feminism, but ends up becoming a symbol of female empowerment. Having failed to direct the male members of her family towards a political career, she decides that her only option is to run for office herself. The lush, tropical atmosphere of Key West is well conveyed, and there is a surprise revelation which brings the book's themes into perspective. This is not Alison Lurie's best book, but it is in many ways an enjoyable read.
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