The Last Good Chance: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: There's a good chance you'll enjoy this
Review: A very true-to-life work of fiction -- Barbash's characters really came alive for me. I was thoroughly engrossed in this somewhat bleak tale of a dying upstate NY town (Lakeland) and the lives of the people who inhabit it. This was a romance and a tale of small town America with a little bit of mystery thrown in.

At the heart of the story is a love triangle between old friends Steven Turner, Jack Lambeau, and Jack's wife, Anne. Jack becomes singularly focused on becoming Lakeland's redeemer through revitalizing the town's lakefront district, so focused that he neglects Anne. She seeks solace in the arms of Turner. A good love triangle can take up an entire novel, but Barbash throws in some other drama as well -- illegal toxic waste dumping. Taking part in the dumping is Jack's brother, Harris, who has some drama of his own going on -- his wife Marla just had their baby, and since he hasn't been much of a husband, Marla doesn't want him around.

Barbash has created some really complex, likeable characters. You'll find yourself rooting for all of them (except Anne, maybe -- I thought she was really stringing these two guys along). The really satisfying thing about this book is, unlike so much modern fiction, that the ending doesn't leave you in complete despair. Not to say that things work out perfectly, but you're left with some hope at the end, and that's always a good feeling to have when you turn the last page.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent debut
Review: I just finished reading "The Last Good Chance" and found it to be a refreshing, keenly observed look at life in small-town America. The plot moves with great energy and force. I found myself absorbed in the world of the book, in the lives of these four characters. By the end I'd felt as though I'd lived through something. And I can't remember when I felt that way about a book.

The novel takes on a wide range of themes: small-town vs big city life; ambition and its perils; the difficulties of making a young marriage work under stressful times. None of the answers are easy, and the book seems reluctant to spell these matters out.

There were times I wondered if the writer bit off more than he could handle, but for the most part the various strains of the book informed one another, and the ending was simply magic.

This is certainly one of my favorite books from the last three or four years. I look forward to more from this author.

Rating:
Summary: overly detached
Review: I wanted to like this book. Really. It had all the components that would ordinarily add up to a good read -- a lonely guy, a quasi-happy guy married to the perfect women, evil business empires, corrupt government, art, what-have-you.

Unfortunately, it doesn't gell. The writing is fine -- Tom Barbash writes very well -- but the perspective is far too detached and consciously ironic to ever allow the characterization to take root. It's obvious early on that frenzied attempts to revive a moribund upstate New York lakeshore town are doomed ot fail, and yet none of the characters ever even seems to notice. Relationships come together and fall apart, infidelities and betrayals occur, and no one raises their voice. People are threatened and beaten by mysterious bad guys implicitly in the pay of mysterious corporate bad guys, and nothing happens -- the beaten character doesn't do the rational thing and report it; he hides.

It's a book in search of a story, just like the newspaper reporter around whom the story circles at first.

The end of the novel is a sort of macabre postmodern American Gothic, where the unhappily-married couple stands shoulder to shoulder figuring out whether or not they should cut their losses and start over -- again -- somewhere else, and leave the problems they've caused behind.

With a more coherent plot, some fleshing out, and some explicit conflicts, this could have been a great book. Instead, it is a book where I kept turning pages waiting for something to happen....