Customer Reviews

The Last Talk with Lola Faye

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The editorial review above, and the liner notes from which it is pulled, make this book out to be something that it is not - a taut gothic thriller asking the question: will Luke stop Lola Faye before it's too late? This, I think, is misleading.

The book takes a pivotal event in two people's lives (the murder of Luke's father/Lola Faye's employer) and looks at it from each of their perspectives, spinning back in time and gradually moving us forward. Thomas Cook does this very well. He is a skilled writer with deep insights into the darker side.

We see that what Luke believes about Lola Faye and his father's murder and his mother and perhaps no closer to the truth than what Lola Faye believes about the same people. The book is Rashômon-like in its structure: the same twisted tale seen from different points of view.

And it is a twisted tale. Despite the fact that the whole story is told as a conversation between two people in a St. Louis bar, the author draws you in and you are compelled to keep reading. While not a page-turner in the classic sense, the book will keep you turning the pages, trying to find the truth in each person's truth.

An insightful compelling read.

Poetic...dark...suspenseful...satisfying. For this reader each of these words aptly describe award winning author Thomas H. Cook's beautifully written novel THE LAST TALKWIHT LOLA FAYE. Reading it is a bit like watching an absorbing two person play as the story is revealed in a conversation between two characters - Lucas "Luke" Page and Lola Faye Gilroy.

Luke is a fair to middling professor and writer who has come to St. Louis to deliver a lecture at the Museum of the West. It's a dreary, wet December evening, and he doesn't anticipate much of a crowd - there seldom is at his lectures. However, the last person he expected or wanted to see was Lola Faye Gilroy, his father's mistress. Her husband had shot and killed his father, and then killed himself. All of this in Glenville, Alabama, a tired Southern town where his father ran a variety store.

Now, Glenville was not your pretty little town but a place pockmarked by abandoned storefronts "their empty windows staring like blinded eyes onto deserted sidewalks....and a windowless library housed in the basement of the police department." Plus "a trailer park perpetually pulsing in the light of a police cruiser, diesel trucks sitting like exhausted mastodons in red-dirt driveways." It was a place Luke couldn't wait to leave - of course, he would leave because he was considered to be "the smartest kid in town." As far as he was concerned Glenville limited his intellectual prowess; he believed that some day he would write a great novel. Yet here he was some years later addressing a sparse audience, and unable to turn Lola Faye down when she urged him to have a drink with her.

As one drink turns into several and their conversation moves on Luke becomes introspective, looking back upon events, mistakes he had made, remembering Fitzgerald saying "you lose yourself in pieces." He wonders if his first small deceit was where the first piece of him had fallen away.

Luke had believed he knew all about his father, an uninspired man who wasn't even able to run a small store efficiently, and left his mother alone for trysts with Lola Faye. He was a man Luke was never able to please, Yet, as the story progresses we find out just how little he really knows about his family or himself.

THE LAST TALK WITHLOLA FAYE is a landmark novel, a story of regret and redemption that will remain with you long after closing the last page.

- Gail Cooke

This story involves the meeting of Luke Paige and Lola Faye Gilroy; years after an event in their lives that changed them and left them as they are, broken. It was a supposed murder - suicide. Luke's father, Lola's husband respectively.

Luke has become a Professor at a Boston College and a writer of small books on history. He is at a reading and signing of his book in St. Louis when Lola Faye shows up after all this time. They go for a drink and to talk and oh does the talk turn dark and mysterious concerning that time when the murder took place.

Luke felt he was above most people due to his intelligence, he went to Harvard. He felt Lola was involved with his father, who he thought was such a simple dull person. Luke's mother encouraged him to better himself and read anything he could get his hands on as she did. They lived in rural Alabama where not much happened to their people.

Luke, in talking to Lola Faye, returns to his youth and the demons he carries with him. This story twists and turns as they discuss all the so called facts and possible lies of the events that happened that day in Alabama to the conclusion which is so sad but incouraging for the future of these people.

I have read other Thomas H. Cook books and they always entertain. "Breakheart Hill" was the first I read, much like this one, very good indeed.

Just like the movie "My Dinner with Andre" this story is almost entirely contained within a conversation. The two main characters talk about their past, the people whom they have loved and hated, the tragedies that ensued, and the unresolved conflicts that follow them to the present. The reader learns about their lives in flashbacks, and the present actions have meaning only when the past is revealed. Very little action takes place in the present tense. Some of the revelations are shocking and disturbing, especially towards the end of the novel.

Mr. Cook overwrites some descriptive passages, instead of letting the action speak for itself. He sometimes tells the reader things he could show them. For example, he writes:
"It seemed strange that the conversation had moved to the police investigation that had followed my father's murder, and for a moment, and as I had so many times before, I wondered if I'd been rather slyly directed from one stream into another." He has already hinted several times that Lola might be more than she seems. The hints are obvious, clunky, and unnecessary. I would rather learn about a character by listening to their words, watching their actions, and seeing them clash with the other characters.

This is a carefully constructed tale of the darkness in the human heart, and the hopefulness that survives for these people. I was troubled and moved by the story. Although there are imperfections, I recognize that it is a fair novel. Some will be bored by the lack of action, or put off by the morbid subject matter, but sometimes life is just like that.

If you are looking for a classic thriller, look elsewhere. The Last Talk with Lola Faye unwinds slowly and feels like an exercise in structured writing: "Compose a novel with only two characters. Use elements familiar to lovers of both Tennessee Williams and Samuel Beckett." It's no surprise that award-winning novelist Thomas H. Cook could meet that challenge.

Lucas Page is in St. Louis on a book tour at his own expense, promoting one of his dull history books. Only one person stays to buy a book--Lola Faye Gilroy from his home town, Glenville, Alabama. Luke remembers Lola Faye as the "hayseed" who had an affair with his father, an affair turned particularly tragic when her estranged husband shot Luke's father and then himself.

Luke's memories of his youth are bitter. His driving motivation was to get out of Glenville, study at Harvard, and write penetrating and acclaimed books; in his hubris, he saw his father's lack of ambition as the main obstacle to glorious success. Luke had gone to Harvard, but had not realized his dream of writing books that expressed the "tactile core" of American history. "It's one thing to bury an old, dead dream," he reflects, "and quite another to attempt, again and again, to resurrect a dream you can't let die, which is what I'd done, always beginning with a passionate concept, then watching as it shrank to a bloodless monograph."

Lola Faye, however, sees the past in a very different light. As she and Luke sit in a bar drinking and talking on this snowy December evening, she challenges him to face the harsh reality of his own moral failings. He is forced to reconsider what he thought he knew about his father and mother, about Lola Faye, but especially about himself. Can Luke find redemption? Can anything bring him back to Glenville and give him another chance?

This is a novel consisting largely of Luke's and Lola Faye's playback of that violent time in Glenville, circling around the events he'd rather forget. While it's not the everyday sort of dramatic tension, Cook gives us a taut and absorbing story full of psychological suspense. It's not that you can't guess what's going to happen, not that you want to watch it all play out, but somehow you can't tear your eyes away until it's finished.

Linda Bulger, 2010

The strength and the trouble with this book lies in the unreliable narrator at its core; Luke, a failed writer, middling academic and bad husband. He has visited a place too close to home, where he encounters Lola Faye, a simple woman who was impetus for his father's death. History is discussed and dissected in a long, painful conversation between the smartest boy in Glenville and the town scandal.

It is a boozy conversation full of bad memories, digressions, paranoia and veiled threats. Or are they? Nothing is quite as it seems, and the reader is kept deliciously off balance as Luke reveals just how much less he is, and Lola reveals just how much more she is, than whatever they appear to be at the story's beginning.

All the characters are perfectly drawn, and in their small town realism lies the beauty and the difficulty of this book; there is really no one to root for, no one to enjoy. Luke is grandiose and narcissistic, his mother frustrated and pathetic, his father inept. Each and every character is humbled by failure and has committed a full share of crimes and sins. Who are we to root for?

Instead, we watch the book play out to its surprisingly hopeful end while not really liking anyone, though I did conceive admiration for poor Lola Faye. Ploddingly truthful, surprisingly intelligent, and always hopeful, she did hold my sympathy in a way that Luke never did. Her dips, twists and turns kept me reading, and enjoying the book until the end. This is an incredibly well-told tale. I only wish I'd liked at least one of the people in it a bit more.

I'm probably the world's biggest Thomas Cook fan, and this was not disappointing--another great novel in an unbroken string of great novels by this master of psychological suspense and mystery.

I discovered Cook's books about 15 years ago with Breakheart Hill and read a lot of them in a hurry from the earlier more straightforward detective novels to those written in the twisting style of Breakheart Hill and this new novel.

You can never be quite sure where the plot's heading with this writing style of exploring memories and phrases open to interpretation. Is that memory true? Is this important or a red herring? Is Lola Faye a killer? Or is the narrator a killer? Maybe the narrator's mother is a killer? You're likely to be convinced of all possibilities at various times as you're reading this book.

This isn't a book for fans of car chases and shootouts. It's at least as much about lost love and childhood memories and middle aged melancholy as it is about identifying the criminal. It's the type of story which you'll feel a part of rather than just being an observer.

Thomas H. Cook writes novels posing as thrillers, but the seminal events that spearhead eventual actions have happened in the past, sometimes long in the past, and the intervening years have never been kind to his narrators. In this book, Luke, a writer who has never lived up to his early promise, is laden down with unresolved guilt and misplaced dreams. He says at one point that he is a boring teacher who writes books that bore even him, when he had hoped to write hands on histories that would make readers taste the campfire smoke and feel the dry soil in their fingers. As in his other books, there is a lot of misunderstanding surrounding his early life and that of his family, mostly on his own part. Cook writes with a great deal of feeling about his subjects, as always, and when the answers come, they are always a revelation. This book doesn't pack the same amount of poignancy that was present in The Chatham School Affair, but it is haunting and compulsively readable despite that.

Lucas Page grew up knowing he was the smartest kid in Glenville, Alabama. Glenville is one of those crumbling Southern towns that has seen better days, probably around the time of the Civil War. Luke escaped Glenville, went to Harvard, and earned his degree. Now he writes history, just like he always wanted to. There's just one thing. The fire in his soul has gone out. He's going nowhere.

Luke is haunted by memories of his father, a disorganized, no-account, middle-aged businessman who ran a place downtown, the generically-named "Variety Store," into the ground. Luke's father was everything Luke never wanted to be, everything he would rise up to overcome. Luke had help from a high school teacher who believed in him and from his mother, a saintly woman who put up with his father's intolerable provocations. For not only was his dad worthless as a shop-keeper, he carried on a tawdry affair with a shop-girl he hired named Lola Faye Gilroy.

Or so Luke believes. His beliefs will be tested when he meets Lola Faye twenty years later, after a book signing in St. Louis. She will challenge what he thinks he knows, and uncover secrets that Luke would have preferred to forget...

I really enjoyed this book. It is a quick read. Lola Faye is marvelously menacing, and you never know what will happen next or how their conversation in a bar at Luke's hotel will end. The tension is palpable, all the more amazing because Luke and Lola Faye do nothing until near the end of the book but talk about their past. The book works as a mystery, too, as Luke and Lola uncover layer upon layer of secrets and misconceptions. The ending is surprisingly bittersweet, and left me wanting to read more from Mr. Cook.