'Last Last Chance' by Fiona Maazel

Last Last Chance, Fiona Maazel’s debut novel, is the frenetic, disjointed narrative of Lucy, a 30-year-old woman struggling to stay sober. Meanwhile, her father was a scientist working on the pneumonic plague; he killed himself after someone stole vials of the plague from his lab. Despite this, Last Last Chance is billed as a comic novel. While it isn’t exactly a-laugh-a-minute, it does have more humor than its subject would suggest. It’s also surprisingly powerful and moving.

It’s quite strange that Fiona Maazel’s debut novel, Last Last Chance, is billed as a "rocking comic novel" since it's about the spread of a super-plague for which there is no treatment or cure. Meanwhile, the narrator, Lucy, is struggling with her drug addiction, coping with her mother's own crack addiction, and reeling from her father's suicide.

Last, Last Chance isn't a story that takes itself too seriously, though, and it doesn't consider any of the above events to be truly tragic. This comes in part from the fact that Maazel's narrator uses drugs to deaden herself to her life, so the reader gets a narrative that's detached and ironic. Lucy's perspective falls somewhere between stream of consciousness and drug-fueled confusion.

This voice is so densely packed that Last Last Chance is hard to get into at first -- and sections covering reincarnation and Norse mythology only increase confusion -- but persistence provides a payoff. As a whole, Last Last Chance is a funny, sad, despairing, and ultimately hopeful book.