Here is the blurb from the back cover:
Rand Cooper has created a world that is completely absorbing. His prose is as strong and clear as his insight." -- Robert Stone
"I'm simply bowled over by the achievement. It is a pure specimen of candor and painful truth. The authenticity cannot be denied. And it is devoid of the sentimentality that infects the common domestic novel to which we have all become resigned." -- - Richard Selzer
The Last to Go is an extraordinarily strong first time out.... The intelligence of this book is central -Cooper's stylistic range and control of reality - but the stories come from the place of true fiction, the informed heart. -- Maureen Howard
"Cooper's writing style sets this book far apart from other modern divorce chronicles. His prose is straightforward but decidedly not minimalist. These stories are rich in the clutter of real lives. The same anecdotes ... turn up repeatedly here. And, as they're told and retold, sometimes by new narrators, this whole book becomes the stuff of family lore: truer and truer, yet always more mysterious." -- - Kirkus Reviews
"Rand Cooper's chronicle of the Slattery family is notable both for the strength of the individual stories and their accumulated force - the force of a good novel.... His style commands ranges of tones from elegant to colloquial, elegaic to comic." -- William Pritchard
Below is the blurb from the dust jacket:
"This fine first novel ... documents suburbia in Cheeveresque terms.... Ironic, accurately observed and captivating, it is a first-rate piece of work." -- Publishers Weekly
A series of interconnected stories comprising a seamless portrait, The Last to Go: A Family Chronicle has the intimate quality of a home movie. Viewed over a thirty-year span from the perspectives of individual family members, the intricate structure of one contemporary marriage is brought to light.
Dan and Mary Ellen Slattery meet on a blind date in the cautious 1950s, the summer before Dan enters medical school. When he takes time off from his chauffering job to catch an advance glimpse of Mary Ellen returning from her job at a women's magazine, he knows: Thi's i's the girl I will marry.
The early years of their marriage brim with confidence. After Dan's public-service stint in Arizona, they move back East, where he becomes a successful surgeon and their growing family settles into a big white house in a wealthy suburb. With their garden parties, ski vacations, expensive cars, and obvious mutual devotion, the Slatteries are the envy of their friends and neighbors.
But there are shadows lurking within this sunny portrait: Dan's sexual restlessness deepens with the years, and incongruous anxieties and misplaced attachments assert themselves in Mary Ellen. As the children grow and move away, each one registers the marital unraveling. Lydia, the oldest, is stuck in a state of perpetual rebellion against her parents' values; to Sharon, the youngest, her parents are at once preoccupied and unduly kind; Toby, through whose eyes we see many of the events, becomes increasingly skeptical as he realizes his adored father is more flawed than he had thought.
Told variously in the first and third person, each tale is complete in itself. Taken together, they tell an eloquent story of happiness and disillusionment, dreams of success and invitations to failure, the terror at the heart of domestic life.
Rand Richards Cooper grew up in Connecticut and graduated from Amherst College in 1981. His fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Ladies Home Journal, and GQ. He currently lives in Maryland and is writing a novel set in Africa.
| Price | $3.50 |
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| Total | $6.50 |
