Last Time They Met, The

Rating:
Summary: Romeo and Juliet with a difference
Review: "The Last Time They Met" is about the endurance of first love, guilt, and dreams of what might have been. It's a hard book to review without revealing the ending, because so much of what the book is about changes suddenly in the last pages. A number of reviewers have complained about the author's abrupt switch of direction. To them, the ending was contrived and not much more believable than the infamous Bobby Ewing shower scene in "Dallas." I'm not one of these readers. The ending totally blind-sided me, hitting like a bolt out of the blue and transforming an ok-but-not-great book into something much better. As I write this, I'm still going back through the narrative in my mind, picking up various strands and seeing them in new ways, reinterpreting what I thought I knew.

The story focuses on a love affair between two poets, Linda Fallon and Thomas Janes. Most of the story is told through Linda's perspective. It begins when the two former lovers, now middle-aged and single, unexpectedly encounter each other at a literary meeting. The novel then backtracks to a time decades earlier when they carried on an adulterous love affair when both were in Africa. It finally concludes with a description of their earliest days as high school sweethearts. Looming over the story are the shadows of disastrous events--a teenage car accident in which a drunken Thomas was the driver, the death of his daughter by drowning, and an unthinkable act committed by Linda in Africa. As Shreve takes her readers back in time, it's obvious that the hand of fate will not let her lovers be, even though the form fate will take isn't altogether clear.

Shreve's prose is very deliberate, and her descriptions have an obsessive quality about them. At times this can make the book drag--the first part, for example starts verrry slowly--but overall it's highly effective. There's an emotional intensity to her writing that can be moving, but also suffocating at times. It's almost as if the characters are living in a dream. There are inconsistencies in Shreve's characterizations and places where you wonder why the characters acted the way they did. In the end, however, it all makes a tragic kind of sense.

"The Last Time We Met" is a truly moving book. It's not for those who want a cut-and-dried linear romance. But most people have elements of Thomas' and Linda's "might have been" story in their past. This is a book to reread in memory after the final paragraph.


Rating:
Summary: Cheap Trick
Review: The title of my review says it all, as far as I'm concerned. Totally unbelievable. You just do NOT do that to your readers. I went back and leafed through the book again to see if it worked, and it didn't. A real stretch.

I give it one star because there was some fine writing in the Africa section. Otherwise, if I'd not been on a Philippine island on vacation with little else to read, I might not have finished. And I felt cheated when I had.