Far From Brooklyn

Book #2 for the year.  Not that I’m counting.

I really like fiction about work.  American novels should be about work, and making money, shouldn’t they?  Work and money are core to the American experience, and probably to the American character, if it comes down to it.

Stewart O’Nan’s “Last Night at the Lobster” is set in the homeliest of settings, a failing Red Lobster outlet in blue collar Connecticut. The restaurant is slated for closing a few days before Christmas, and its manager, Manny, a lifelong employee, must get the restaurant, and its staff and clientele and himself, through the final night of business.

There is a subplot involving Manny’s failed romance with a waitress, and his unsatisfactory replacement relationship with another woman, but really this book is a meditation on work, and getting through the day, and doing a job right.  It’s rich with detail about the minute-to-minute operations of a low-end chain eatery: the food prep, the cleanup, the petty rivalries, the indignities inflicted by oblivious customers,  the pleasures of the break room, the occasional flashes of fear that are the norm for anyone who works somewhere that strangers are actually encouraged to come through the door.

Thinking about other American writers who have made work a theme, Richard Russo came to mind.  It’s funny: the one book of Russo’s that I didn’t like – didn’t finish – was “Empire Falls,"  which was largely set in a diner.  But there is good restaurant-Russo, too.  A lot of "Nobody’s Fool” (which I loved) unfolded in a diner, where the hero, Sully, serves essentially as a volunteer short order cook. (Supposedly Russo wrote a good chunk of his first book, “Mohawk” in a diner.)

As for O’Nan, he manages to atomize the workings of the Red Lobster without fetishizing it, without tipping into slobbering prole worship (Lo! The Working Man!) –  and amazingly, without being a bore.  Quite an achievement.

And the book surely brought back memories of Eastern winters, and that growing dread that sometimes came over you during bad weather – will I be able to get home? Will the trains be running? Will my car be plowed in?

Great book.