Amazon.com Review
Questions of loyalty and morality arise when a small town's attempt at economic renewal uncovers deeper troubles in Tom Barbash's debut novel,
The Last Good Chance. Ivy League-educated urban-planning star Jack Lambeau has returned to his hometown of Lakeland, New York to manage the slumping upstate port's reinvention as a boutique-filled tourist destination. Joining him is his fiancée, Anne, who has left her Manhattan home to pursue her interest in painting. Caught up in the regenerative fervor of his own devising, Jack chooses to ignore flaws in his professional and personal designs, including the toxic waste barrels being illegally dumped on area farms by Lakeland's mayor. Among those carrying out the dumping is Jack's underachieving brother Harris, who attempts to cover up a related death in his crew by secretly burying the body in Jack's backyard. Jack's close friend Steven Turner, a restless journalist for the local paper, is soon tipped off to the scandal. His big break, however, might come at the cost of the town's prosperity, Jack's career, and their friendship, which becomes additionally strained when Turner begins an affair with Anne.
Throughout, each character attempts their own form of reinvention to overcome personal crises, and The Last Good Chance becomes, among other things, a satisfying study of transformation and its limits. "If the past was a flexible thing," Jack contemplates, "so might the future be, in the right hands." While his realistic prose at times fails to match the ambition of his outline, Barbash often incorporates just the right amount of suspense, humor, and insight to make for an ultimately multifaceted and engaging drama. --Ross Doll
From Publishers Weekly
Barbash shows himself to be a knowing guide to smalltown politics in a first novel with extraordinary empathic reach. Steven Turner is a young journalist exiled at a paper in Lakeland, a decaying port town in rural upstate New York. His best friend, Jack Lambeau, is the Lakeland town planner. An ambitious Ivy League graduate, Lambeau had had difficulty advancing his experimental urban planning ideas in New York City. When Lakeland's mayor, William Hickey, promised him carte blanche for his New Urbanist-style visions, Lambeau agreed to return to his hometown. With evangelical fervor, he tries to revive Lakeland through a glittering lakefront development project. What he doesn't know, and what the mayor does, is that there are tubs of toxic materials illegally dumped under the lakefront. Soon Turner gets wind of this situation. Should he report it and risk shutting down Lambeau's project? Turner's position is complicated by his secret affair with Lambeau's wife, Anne, a painter. The novel shuttles between Lambeau's compromises with the mayor, Turner's ethical dilemma and Anne's creative and spiritual ennui, all explored in clipped, hard-boiled prose with a dash of black humor ("[Turner] banged out his daily like a good soldier and then his Sunday feature, a fluff-puff about a family in the woods who farmed maple syrup for a living. He'd learned everything you could find out about tree sap in the morning and 'tapped' it out that evening. This was his life"). This is a taut, intricate vision of ambition, corruption and love in the postindustrial era. (Sept.)
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
