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Overview
Every schoolboy in America knows the work of author Wilkie Walker, who won fame and fortune with his accessible nature books. But as he turns seventy, his renown is nearly gone. Now he sits up at night torturing himself with fears that his career was a waste, his talent is gone, and his body destroyed by cancer. His wife, Jenny, twenty-five years younger, can tell only that he is out of sorts. She has no idea her husband is on the verge of giving up on life.
When Jenny suggests spending the winter in Key West, Wilkie goes along with it. After all, if you need to plan a fatal “accident,” Florida is a perfectly good place to do so. And when they touch down in the sunshine state, the Walkers find it’s not too late to live life—or end it—however they damn well please.
The National Book Award–shortlisted author of Foreign Affairs Affairs, The War Between the Tates, and The Last Resort writes a “sparkling, smart . . . highly volatile” novel (The New York Times).
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alison Lurie including rare images from the author’s collection.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781453271230 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 11/13/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 302 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Hometown:
Ithaca, New York; London, England; Key West, FloridaDate of Birth:
September 3, 1926Place of Birth:
Chicago, IllinoisEducation:
A.B., Radcliffe College, 1947Read an Excerpt
The Last Resort
A Novel
By Alison Lurie
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1998 Alison LurieAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4532-7123-0
CHAPTER 1
At three a.m. on a windy late-November night, Jenny Walker woke in her historic house in an historic New England town, and sensed from the slope of the mattress and the chill of the flowered percale sheets that Wilkie Walker, the world-famous writer and naturalist, was not in bed beside her.
Often now Jenny woke to this absence. The first time, after lying half awake for twenty minutes, she tiptoed downstairs and found her husband sitting in the kitchen with a mug of tea. Wilkie smiled briefly and replied to her questions that of course he was all right, that everything was all right. "Go back to bed, darling," he told her, and Jenny followed his instructions, just as she had done for a quarter century.
After that night she didn't go to look for him, but now and then she would mention his absence the next morning. Wilkie would say that he'd had a little indigestion and needed a glass of soda water, or wanted to write down an idea. There was no reason to be concerned about him, his tone implied. Indeed her concern was unwelcome, possibly even irritating.
But since the day they met, Jenny had been more concerned about Wilkie Walker than anyone or anything in the world. He had come into the University Housing Office at UCLA where she was working after graduation while she waited to see what would happen next in her life. It was a misty, hot summer morning when Wilkie appeared: the most interesting-looking older man Jenny had ever seen, with his broad height, his full explorer's mustache; his shock of blond-brown hair, steel-blue eyes, and sudden dazzling smile. Dazzled, she heard him ask about sabbatical sublets for the fall. He wanted somewhere quiet with a garden—he liked to work out of doors if he could, he explained—but he also hoped to be within a half-hour's walk of the university. Which no doubt wasn't possible, he added with another radiant smile.
But Jenny was able to assure him that she knew just the place. And two days later, while she was still dreaming of Wilkie's visit and wondering if she could get leave to audit his lectures, he reappeared to thank her and ask her to have lunch with him.
It was only later that Jenny realized how unusual that had been, because at the time Wilkie Walker was extremely wary of all women. He had been married twice, both times briefly and disastrously ("I get on well with most mammals, but I seem to have difficulty with our species"). First to a sweet and graceful but totally impractical girl whom he compared to a highbred Persian cat ("all cashmere fur and huge sky-blue eyes and special diet, but she always had a slight cold, couldn't hike more than a mile without collapsing, and was terrified of most other animals").
Then, on the rebound, he had married a young woman who was equally good looking and much more competent and robust ("strong and healthy as an Alaskan husky"), but who turned out to be deeply hostile to men and especially to Wilkie. For example, when at a time of crisis he asked her to retype one of his articles, the husky not only growled at him but dropped his manuscript into the kitchen wastebasket, among eggshells and wet grapefruit rinds and crusts of rye toast.
At that first lunch Jenny knew that Wilkie Walker was someone she could, even should, devote her life to. And as she came to know him better she was almost shocked to discover how badly he needed this devotion; how much of his own life was wasted on inessentials. How often he had to set his work aside for tasks someone else (Jenny, for instance) could do for him much faster and more easily, for Wilkie had no natural aptitude for shopping or household repairs or balancing a checkbook.
And after they were married she did all these things and much more: happily, gratefully. Soon she became able to help Wilkie in many other ways: not only typing and proofreading his books and articles, but accompanying him on field trips, making notes, and taking photographs. At home she helped with library research, copying and faxing, finding illustrations (often her own photos), and creating tables and graphs. As Wilkie became ever busier and more famous, she kept his schedule of lectures and interviews and meetings, arranged airline tickets and hotel reservations, took phone and E-mail messages, and corresponded in his name with agents and editors and fans.
Usually now, when Jenny woke at night and found herself alone, she sighed, turned over, and slid back into oblivion. But tonight sleep didn't come. She lay in the antique four-poster bed listening to the windy scrape of bare twigs against glass, thinking that everything was not all right and neither was Wilkie. For months—since he retired last spring, really—his nights had been wakeful, and more and more often he seemed restless or weary during the day. Moreover, none of the things that he used to enjoy so fully seemed to please him now. For the first time since she'd known him, Wilkie had to be urged to attend concerts, lectures, or films. He didn't read most of the books and articles on nature and the environment that crowded into the mailbox, often accompanied by letters of gratitude and appreciation. More and more often he declined to serve on committees and boards, and he delayed returning telephone calls, even after Jenny had gently reminded him several times.
More worrying still, Wilkie hadn't finished his important new book, The Copper Beech. This, perhaps the culminating work of his life, was the portrait in depth of a great tree on the Convers College campus; it would bring together all his interests: botany, climatology, ecology, entomology, geology, history, soil science, and zoology. Wilkie's agent and editor were excited about The Copper Beech, and it had already been announced in his publisher's catalogue. Every day Jenny expected her husband to give her the final chapter to type into the computer, and every day she was disappointed.
Besides this, and almost worst of all, Wilkie seemed to be losing interest in his friends and family. For over a month he hadn't been to the faculty club, and he wouldn't let her ask anyone to dinner. Last week when the children were home for Thanksgiving he had had little to say to them. He had less and less to say to Jenny too; also, for nearly a month he had not suggested making love.
Clearly something was wrong. And that being so, it was Jenny's responsibility to correct it. Perhaps, she had thought at first, her husband was ill but didn't realize this, because he had hardly been sick a day in his life. He had always refused, for instance, to acknowledge colds: when one showed signs of wanting to attach itself to him he ignored it until, defeated, it slunk away.
A month ago Jenny had persuaded Wilkie to have a medical checkup—first on general principles, then resorting at last to her usual last resort: the claim that it would make her feel better. Grumbling about the waste of time, reiterating his belief that people who weren't ill should stay away from doctors, Wilkie accompanied her to Dr. Felch's office and was pronounced to be in excellent health for a man of his age. Prompted by Jenny, he admitted that he occasionally got up at night, but declared that he saw nothing wrong with this; he refused to accept the term "insomnia."
Like almost everyone in Convers, Dr. Felch was somewhat in awe of Wilkie Walker, the town's most famous citizen. More for Jenny's sake than his patient's, perhaps, he wrote a prescription for what he called a "muscle relaxant," which Wilkie afterward refused to take. The trouble with most people today, he told his wife, was that their muscles were too relaxed, not to say atrophied.
Though Wilkie seemed to have forgotten the whole episode, one phrase Dr. Felch had used kept running through Jenny's head: "a man of his age." Wilkie's age was now seventy. Not for the first time, she recalled the uncomfortable conversation she had had when she first brought him home to meet her parents. Wilkie clearly hadn't noticed the slight hesitation in their welcome, and would have been surprised to hear what was said when his wife-to-be confronted her mother later in the kitchen.
"Darling, I do like him," Jenny's mother had insisted. "And of course I realize he's brilliant. He was wonderfully interesting about those South American bats. And I can see he really loves you. But—" She turned on the water in the sink, sloshing away the rest of the sentence, if any.
"But what?"
"Well. He has been married twice before, that always ... Under Jenny's hurt, resentful stare, her voice faltered. "And then ... the age difference. You're barely twenty-one, and Wilkie Walker is forty-six, almost my age. I always think of what my mother said once: If you marry someone much older, you don't ever quite grow up. And when you're forty-six, Wilkie will be seventy. An old man."
Jenny refused to listen. Wilkie Walker was not like other people, she declared. He had more energy and endurance and enthusiasm than most of her college friends.
Her mother, for whom tact was almost a religion, never brought up the subject again. But her comments continued to swim in the weedy depths of Jenny's mind, occasionally surfacing in a sharklike manner. "You see, you were quite wrong," she had felt like telling her mother on several occasions, the latest being her own forty-sixth birthday last spring. "Wilkie hasn't become an old man at all. When we were on that walking tour in Greece last month nobody could keep up with him except the tour guide." She did not say this only because, though her mother was still in excellent health, her father was now, after two heart attacks, all too evidently an old man at seventy-four: stoop-shouldered and short of breath, slow-speaking and slow-moving.
Remembering all this, Jenny lay listening to the wind scratch at the glass, recalling recent conversations with her two grown children over Thanksgiving vacation.
"I tell you what it is, Mom," Ellen had said as they were washing the dishes. "I think Dad has got a clinical depression."
Since her daughter was now a medical student, and like many such students given to scattershot diagnoses, Jenny both believed her and did not believe her. "Oh, darling," she temporized. "I don't know."
"That's what I think," Ellen repeated. "I'm surprised his doctor isn't more concerned."
"Dr. Felch is concerned. He admires Wilkie very much."
"Everyone admires him very much," Ellen said. "That's not the point."
Billy (Wilkie Walker Jr.) was as usual less definite, but no more reassuring. "Yeah, I sort of agree with Ellen," he admitted the next day in answer to his mother's question. "Something's wrong. Dad seems to be moving around less, you know? Like he wouldn't come for a walk yesterday because it was too cold? I never heard that before; he was always dragging us out in the goddamnedest freezing snowstorms. Maybe you should go somewhere warmer this winter."
"Somewhere warmer?"
"Like, I don't know. Florida, for instance."
"Oh, darling. Your father would hate Florida." A glaring panorama of pink beach hotels and condominiums trimmed in neon and surrounded by artificial neon-green turf rose in Jenny's mind.
"I know, Mom. But you could try Key West. It's different from the rest of Florida. Sort of like Cape Cod with palms, that's what my roommate said when we were there on spring break last year. And there's supposed to be lots of writers and artists around that Dad could talk to."
Jenny lay in bed rehearing these voices, wondering if she ought to go downstairs, fearing that if she did Wilkie would not be pleased to see her. For a while she distracted herself from this anxiety with familiar, less pressing anxieties about her two beautiful and brilliant children. She pictured Ellen, who so much resembled Wilkie: tall, ruddy, and broad-shouldered—and also, since early childhood, always so sure of herself. Sometimes lately Jenny was almost frightened of her daughter. I wouldn't like to be Ellen's patient when she becomes a doctor, she thought: she'd be so sure she knew what was wrong with me. Then in the dark she blushed, ashamed of this disloyalty.
She imagined Billy, who had been such a beautiful, affectionate little boy, and now seemed somehow subdued and uncertain. Both of them were doing well professionally, but Jenny sometimes worried that Billy, isolated in the nearly all-male world of computer hardware, would never meet a nice young woman, and that Ellen would scare nice young men off. Then they would never marry and have children Jenny could love.
Jenny marveled at people who desired expensive manufactured objects like an indoor swimming pool or a Mercedes. She already had too many such objects to take care of. What she longed for no money could buy: at least one grandchild. And now, for Wilkie to be himself again.
Downstairs a thin, icy wind rattled the antique bubbled panes of the windows and sliced its way into the family room, but Wilkie Walker did not adjust the thermostat. He remained huddled in his forest-green L.L. Bean bathrobe in a corner of the sofa, watching the weather channel with the sound turned off and thinking about death.
Death was what Wilkie thought about most of the time these days. The death, over the past few years, of two close friends and colleagues; the slow, lingering death of the natural environment. The progressive destruction of the ozone layer, the slashing and burning of tropical forests, the poisoning of oceans, wars and assassinations in Africa and Asia, terrorist bombings, drug wars in great cities, the scummy sulfurous yellow-gray foam on Baird Creek behind his house, the raccoon he saw smashed on the road as he was driving home yesterday afternoon, and his own regress toward extinction.
If they could have heard his thoughts, Wilkie's thousands of fans and many of his remaining friends and colleagues would no doubt have shared his shock and sorrow, except for the last item. What was he complaining about, for God's sake? they might have said. For a seventy-year-old man he was in good shape. He was also a famous, perhaps the most famous popular naturalist of his generation: the most eloquent among those who had called public attention to our wanton destruction of the earth and its flora and fauna. His best-known and best-loved book, The Last Salt Marsh Mouse, had never been out of print, and there was hardly a schoolchild in America who had not read its famous first paragraph:
It is the year 2000. In the Zoological Gardens of a great city, a small furry pale-brown, bright-eyed creature clings to a dry stalk in a clump of artificial reeds and stares at the passing humans. A sign stapled to the other side of the wire identifies him as
Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse,
Reithrodontomys raviventris
"SALTY"
Salty is alone in his cage, though once he shared it with his parents and four older siblings. As far as anyone knows, he is the last of his family, the last of his race: the sole surviving salt marsh mouse on this earth.
More than anything else, it was this book and this passage that had made Wilkie Walker famous. The Last Salt Marsh Mouse, unlike its namesake, had thrived and reproduced profusely over the last quarter century; it had given birth to paperback editions, translations into sixteen foreign languages, innumerable excerpts in anthologies and condensations, and simplifications for the juvenile market. There had been documentary film, television, and cartoon versions, sometimes with a tacked-on happy ending. "Salty" posters and T-shirts were available in science museums everywhere, and toy salt marsh mice, some moderately authentic as to size, color, and shape, and others distorted in a Disney manner, were widely sold. "Salty" had become a cuddly shorthand symbol for the threatened extinction of North American mammalian species. He had made Wilkie's fortune, and his name a household word.
But now, whenever Wilkie recalled this endangered rodent, he felt a shudder of self-hatred and despair. In spite of the hundreds of thousands of copies they had sold, his books had in some ways done more harm than good. Many salt marsh mice had been illegally kidnapped for sale as pets; others had been acquired by zoos that wanted to display this now-famous mammal. As a result, just as in Wilkie's worse-case scenario, Salty was now nearing extinction in the wild, and the world was going to hell in a nonbiodegradable plastic handbasket.
Last week, against his better judgment, he had given yet another interview to a student from the local high school newspaper.
"How many species do you figure you have helped to preserve, Professor Walker?" the child, a pimply girl, had inquired.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Last Resort by Alison Lurie. Copyright © 1998 Alison Lurie. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
What People are Saying About This
Lurie moves her players around with tthe kind of giant board-game steps that make for a fine summer novel. . . . But there's a smudge at the cneter of The Last Resort where a fully drawn Lurie character is needed. -- Entertainmeent Weekly
Interviews
On Friday, July 31, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Alison Lurie, author of THE LAST RESORT.
Moderator: Welcome, Alison Lurie! We're honored you could spend some time with us today to discuss THE LAST RESORT. How are you this evening?
Alison Lurie: Fantastic, considering that I just got off a plane from Miami an hour ago!
Claire from Sarasota: You say in your pre-interview that THE LAST RESORT grew out of some short stories that you wrote. Can you tell us more about this? Also, did any of your other novels evolve from stories?
Alison Lurie: I don't think I said that. THE LAST RESORT comes from things I have observed about the world over the past ten years and especially about what I have seen and thought about when I was in Key West. No, but my stories in WOMEN AND GHOSTS are based on ideas for novels that I was keeping in a folder called Ideas.
Ellen from Portland, OR: What made you decide to set this novel in Key West? Do you frequent there? Is it true that Key West is somewhat of a writer's colony?
Alison Lurie: Yes, I go to Key West every winter for a month or more in order to warm up from the place I live most of the time -- upstate New York -- which has a long, cold winter. I won't call Key West a writer's colony, because there are so many others that go there from other professions, but it is a place that has always attracted writers, beginning in the '20s with Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and the poets Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop.
Dean from Yarmouth, ME: Your first novel in ten years! I have missed a Lurie novel! What have you been up to since then?
Alison Lurie: I have published a collection of short stories called WOMEN AND GHOSTS, and I have edited THE OXFORD BOOK OF MODERN FAIRY TALES, and I have written many reviews and essays -- a lot of them on children's literature -- and I have taught school at Cornell.
Cynthia from New Rochelle: I see that you just published a book on the subversive powers of children's literature. Is children's literature an academic speciality of yours? Can you tell us a little bit about the book?
Alison Lurie: Yes. This is actually a reissue of a book I published in 1990. The thesis is that the books children love most are subversive; by that I mean that they don't necessarily support adult rules and interests. For example, ALICE IN WONDERLAND has a heroine that doesn't behave like a nice little Victorian girl. She doesn't sit quietly; instead she jumps up and follows a rabbit down his hole. The children in THE CAT AND THE HAT are visited by an animal who wrecks the house. The children ask themselves, Should they tell their mother what went on that day? And it ends up with the line, "Well, what would you do if your mother asked you?" The implication is if you can get away with wrecking the house, why not? And this book is tremendously popular with children.
Brook from Chicago: What is the significance of the book's title?
Alison Lurie: It is kind of pun. Key West is known locally as this because it is the last in the chain of the Florida Keys. But it is also as a character says in the book "It is the place where you go when other places haven't worked out for you." It is a place that I think is very freeing because it is very tolerant of different kinds of people, different interests, and different lifestyles.
Pam from Briarcliff: Congratulations on your new novel! I am loving it! Just wondering, what inspired the character of Wilkie and his suicidal tendencies?
Alison Lurie: I know a number of people, many of them college professors, who recently retired, and I think retirement can be very difficult for men, especially if they have few interests outside their work. Wilkie is an environmentalist, [dedicated] for, let us say, 50 years to trying to save endangered species, and he feels that in many cases, he has failed. I know people like this, people who have high ideals, who have tried to do something for the world and are discouraged when they realize their career is over and they haven't accomplished what they hoped to do. And perhaps the higher, the more altruistic their ambitions, the harder this is.
Mary from Pennsylvania: You described Wilkie and his state of mind very well. Did you need to do research on depression for this book?
Alison Lurie: I think that it is hard to get to my age and teach college and not to have run in to depression somewhere, even if you don't have it yourself -- as I don't.
Sara from Petersburg: Your dialogue is so quick and witty. Do you find dialogue to be the easiest to write, or does the challenge of it attract you?
Alison Lurie: I enjoy writing dialogue, and if I have a good idea, a good sense of who my characters are, I can hear them speaking.
Craig from London: Your writing is so funny, and you are generally recognized as a comic novelist. Is this what you set out to be? In your opinion, why is it that people find your work funny?
Alison Lurie: Heaven knows! I didn't set out to be a comic novelist, but I think my take on the world is nearer to comic than tragic. I have no idea why people find my work funny. Humor is a strange thing anyway.
Dale from Williamsburg: You are hailed as a comic novelist. Do you see some common threads to what makes novels funny? Are there some foolproof techniques you apply again and again?
Alison Lurie: No, I think that most people that write comedy have a unique voice, that the comedy of one writer is not like that of the other. People are funny in different ways. I couldn't be funny like Dave Barry is. No techniques -- I don't know how you do it!
Peter from San Francisco: Do you write your novels with a particular audience in mind? If so, does this help you shape the humor?
Alison Lurie: I probably have in mind an audience of all my friends and people who have written to me to say that they have enjoyed my books.
Berry from Williamsburg: The character of Jenny in the beginning of THE LAST RESORT is an antifeminist of sorts, totally subservient to Wilkie and his career. But then she begins dabbling in lesbianism in Key West. What can you tell us about the evolution of this character as you created her?
Alison Lurie: I believe that women have a right not to have a career and to work with their husbands. Jenny has suffered from feminism just the way women in an earlier generation suffered from not being able to have a separate career, for instance in the '50s. I think women should have both options. I also think that men should have both options. If a man wants to stay home and be with the children while his wife has an important career, he should be able to do this without any criticism or embarrassment. We now have some poor guys saying, "I am just a househusband." Just as women said, "I am just a housewife." I think it is a shame in both cases.
Pam from Cambridge: Have you ever written from the first-person perspective, or does this inhibit dialogue?
Alison Lurie: I have done it twice, once in a novel called IMAGINARY FRIENDS and once in REAL PEOPLE, and several of the stories in WOMEN AND GHOSTS are told in the first person.No, it doesn't make dialogue more difficult. You have to suspend your disbelief that this narrator remembers what was said. But this is a convention, like the convention in the novelistic dialogue that no one says "ah" or "um" -- or at least they say it much less often than in real life.
Robert from Stonybrook: How has winning a Pulitzer Prize affected your life? Do you feel other writers or critics take your work more seriously?
Alison Lurie: I believe that winning a prize, though it doesn't change one word of a book, does impress many people. The advantage is that it does bring you more readers. The disadvantage is that it tends to make people take the prize-winning book much more seriously than the other books you have written.
Monica from Richmond, VA: I loved your book! There are so many funny and interesting characters -- each so distinct that they could almost be the subject of a short story. Did you have a favorite among them? Do they resemble people that you know?
Alison Lurie: I don't have a favorite. I like them all, and I hope to God that none of them resemble anyone I know. I try hard not to write about any of my friends or acquaintances.
Linda from Martha's Vineyard: I see that you teach at Cornell. Do you believe that a master's in fine arts is a worthy pursuit for an aspiring writer, or do you think it is best to just start writing and see if you can get published?
Alison Lurie: I think that if you have the time and can get into a good MFA program, it is a wonderful chance to see what you can do unencumbered by a 9-to-5 job. It is also a chance to meet other writers and exchange manuscripts, read each others' works, and get a sense of what people in your generation are doing and writing about.
Brian from New York: How did you get your first book published? How young were you?
Alison Lurie: My first book was not published until I was 34, and after ten years I was unable to publish a novel. It was published because an editor had seen a shorter piece that I had written and wrote to me and asked if I had a novel. I did!
Linda from Philadelphia, PA: Do you have a favorite among your novels? Any character that is especially endearing to you? Thanks for all the wonderful fiction. It has provided me hours of entertainment!
Alison Lurie: Thank you! I love them all equally. To be asked that is like being asked which of your children you like best.
Lynn from Pikes Peak: Do you think THE LAST RESORT could have been a novel you wrote 20 years ago, or did its subject matter require you to be a more mature writer?
Alison Lurie: I don't think I could have written this book 20 years ago, because I wasn't as aware of the issues that are involved.
Pete from Atlanta: Do you feel that your writing has changed or evolved in any manner over the years?
Alison Lurie: I think that over the years the things that I write about have changed. I don't think my own style has change a great deal. Perhaps it has become more serious.
Fran from Rhode Island: Do you have another in the works? If so, what is it about?
Alison Lurie: I don't, and if I did I wouldn't tell, because I believe to talk too much about a work in progress is destructive to it.
Tracey from Ft. Myers: Have the film rights for any of your books been acquired?
Alison Lurie: Three of my books have been made into television films THE WAR BETWEEN THE TATES, IMAGINARY FRIENDS, and FOREIGN AFFAIRS. None have been made into real films.
Amanda B. from Great Falls: What is this book trying to say about Key West? Is it a microcosm of something larger? Is there a larger lesson here?
Alison Lurie: I think that there are several larger lessons, but not about what Key West is, except that Key West is a place that is tolerant of difference and eccentricity. It is a place where people can change. I have always said, if you can encapsulate the lesson of a novel in a sentence or two, you might as well rent a billboard and write this lesson on it!
Scott from New Canaan: Whom would you consider some of your greatest literary influences?
Alison Lurie: Jane Austen, Dickens, E. Nesbit, and Christopher Isherwood.
Moderator: Thank you for your thoughtful answers to our probing questions, Alison Lurie. We wish you a wonderful weekend and continued success with THE LAST RESORT.
Alison Lurie: Thank you very much for joining us!
