The Last Good Chance: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Dusk set on the sidewalks of Lakeland, New York, and the children roamed free, gathering around parked cars, or squirting water pistols under the Lakeland..." (more)
Key Phrases: last good chance, harbor sites, New York, Tom Barbash, Terry Miller (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (September 7, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312287968
• ISBN-13: 978-0312287962
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,327,324 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An impressive debut, September 4, 2002

By	Esther (Providence, RI United States) - See all my reviews

The Last Good Chance is a great read. It's the kind of book you'll be thinking about long after you've turned the last page.
Its look at small-town American life is reminiscent of The Corrections or Empire Falls. Yet I think in some ways it's superior. It has more of a plot than Empire Falls and its characters are more human, less caricatures, than in The Corrections. It touches on deep themes and at its heart, it's a good story, well told.
I found Barbash's portrait of the upstate New York community of Lakeland and what transpires as it attempts to remake itself totally absorbing. We all have a hometown and our relationship to that place can be complex and often ambivalent. Barbash touches on that in his character of urban planning whiz kid Jack Lambeau, who returns to Lakeland from New York City determined to turn around his down-on-its-luck hometown.
What happens as Lambeau attempts to remake Lakeland, turn its drab waterfront into a thriving commercial and cultural centerpiece, a la Boston's Quincy Market or Baltimore's Inner Harbor, forms the core of this story.
In many ways, it strikes at the heart of something very unique about being American - the desire and the ability to constantly remake ourselves - or at least try - and the choices and compromises we make along the way.
This is an impressive debut from Tom Barbash and I'm looking forward to reading his next book.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This one's for every American town that prosperity forgot..., November 11, 2002

By	Jennifer Wilson (Cortland, New York) - See all my reviews

I was at once delighted and saddened at the way Barbash has figured out those small communities that have been left behind by successive waves of American prosperity. The folks in those communities have no insight on the fact it's a hopeless task to rebuild their modest economies. They just don't seem to grasp the big picture. But, they are so noble in their struggle and you can't help rooting for them. Hey, I'm one of 'em. I happen to have lived in many small, upstate New York communities like the mythical one created by the author, and the folks he writes about seem as real and complex as the ones I run into downtown at the post office and the hairdresser's. Barbash's novel focuses, unblinking, on the death throes of the middle class American dream. I'm glad someone has given us the big picture.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like a great independent movie, June 3, 2003

By A Customer

Something about this book really got to me. I completely fell for the characters, their lives and the mistakes they make. Most of all--Harris, the "black sheep" brother, just slayed me! He goes from stealing a clean pair of socks in the gym, to finding these moments of unexpected grace.

If you liked the movie "You Can Count On Me" or "In the Bedroom" you'll love this book. It's all about relationships and moments when characters find themselves doing the unthinkable and perhaps never quite admitting it to themselves. Subtle and remarkable, the prose is deceptively minimal, unlike so many of these other "big" novels nowadays. This is a real find.