Lucy Clark is depressed. She's loveless. She's a drug addict. But you'll love her.
No, really! You will, because she's so incorrigibly, unnervingly, heartbreakingly funny.
Lucy reigns as comedian-in-chief of Fiona Maazel's marvelous new first novel. The author is daughter of Lorin Maazel, one-time conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony and now music director of the New York Philharmonic.
As a 29-year-old cocaine queen, Lucy is, uh, hardly a role model for kiddies; as this bittersweet story's breezy, slangy narrator, though, she's a real hoot.
The Clark household on Manhattan's Upper East Side has to rate as one of the most dysfunctional families in contemporary fiction. Mom is Isifrid (Izzie), a poor Norwegian immigrant reinvented as a fashion-industry mogul who has fallen into coke addiction.
By Fiona Maazel.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($25)
Lucy's half-sister, Hannah, already seems poised, at 12, to follow Mom and Lucy's descent into hell. Isifrid's aging mother, Agneth (Aggie), functions as an everyday reminder of mortality.
Dad, a biologist, has recently committed suicide after being accused of letting loose a deadly virus dubbed the Superplague. There's no indication that his was a purposeful act, but the poor man was driven out of his job, indicted and demonized by the press.
The threat of plague looms over every page of this book. Maazel never has to utter the word "terrorism" for us to catch the terrifying implications. Nor are we left unaware of the plagues of drugs or of lives bereft of love.
In the face of this spectrum of horrors, Lucy's eerie gallows humor may not be a reassuring antidote, but it helps, and it comes in enough varieties to keep us continually off balance. For instance, this wry description: "There is a Potato Head effect to the way [Aggie's] body has arranged itself over the years. ... When she laughs, her stomach bobs with zero regard for what the rest of her is doing."
Despite a gaggle of guffaws, be assured that Maazel never romanticizes addiction. She does not hesitate to rub our noses in the grim, nasty business of living for nothing but the next fix. The pain at the bottom of it all flows freely like an open wound.
Emotionally orphaned, Lucy desperately wants to love and be loved. The only candidate in sight, Eric, has betrayed her by marrying her best friend from childhood. Still, she can't stop loving him.
The man who hopes to replace him in her heart is an oafish figure of fun nearly twice her age. Stanley is bent on producing offspring using the preserved eggs of his late wife. All that's lacking is a surrogate mother. More grist for the author's laugh mill; more confusion and angst for Lucy.
Despair, not hope, finally propels Lucy and Mom to a Texas rehab center. Is recovery any more likely, Lucy asks, than reincarnation? Is a newly revitalized me really possible? Maazel's teeter-totter narrative has readers plunging emotionally up and down along with her protagonist.
All the while, Maazel comments shrewdly on the way plague infects the body politic and media: "ABC has hired several trampy-looking women to deliver the bad news as they see fit. As for Fox, they have decided to downplay the outbreak lest anyone turn against the government as a result."
"Last Last Chance" fuses the outrageous apocalyptic vision of Chuck Palahniuk's fiction and the cerebral dark comedy of Marisha Pessl's "Special Topics in Calamity Physics." I don't know whether Maazel has experienced the agonies of addiction her novel evokes. Either way, she has pulled off a remarkable feat of the imagination.
First Published: April 15, 2008, 8:00 a.m.