Last Night at the Lobster is perfect. Stewart O’Nan is master of being both spare and full at the same time: there is not one word in excess, not one unnecessary gesture or excisable scene. All the parts of this amazing novel fit together, characters, place, and plot, to create an unforgettable twelve hours in the life of Manny, manager of the New Britain Red Lobster.
The novel is a paragon of observation, rendered from Manny’s point of view and with the perfect pitch of realism and detail: “mall traffic on a gray winter’s day, stalled….scattered flakes drift down like ash….a line of salted cars takes a left into the mall entrance, splitting as they sniff for parking spots.” Within the first paragraph, the scene is set for us. The second paragraph gives us the first hints of Manny: “[a] white shitbox of a Buick, the kind a grandmother might leave behind, the driver’s-side door missing a strip of molding.”
Manny gets out of his car and the hours of his work day begin to roll out for us. Facts of his life will slowly start accumulating as they would accumulate in a man’s mind, thinking as he works. There are no asides for the reader, no explanations of who, what, and where, but we get it all, the story building through Manny’s thoughts about his grandmother, his pregnant girlfriend, and his world of the Red Lobster, a world peopled by his ex-lover whom he still desires, employees loyal and not-so loyal, and the to-be-served customers. This world that Manny helms is coming to an end tonight at closing, his location to be shut down under economic pressures Manny can’t understand: “Manny’s done his best…He’s whitewashed graffiti and pushed the heart-healthy menu and taught his crew that every little bite counts, trying to produce a magical dining experience for his customers. He’s done everything they asked, yet there must have been something more, something he missed.”
Manny goes about his last day focused on his tasks to get the Lobster open and ready for the day, and then moving things along as smoothly as he can through disgruntled employees at half-staff levels, a snow storm, and particular customers. Yet his thoughts slip back again and again to the fact that this is the end, the last day for all of his customary daily tasks and the last day he will spend with Jacquie, a woman he loved intensely and briefly. Again, the details are set out simply, sparingly, but with every piece necessary, every detail rendered with grace: “Last day or not, he has to stick to the checklist, and [he] lugs a heavy bucket of dark, stinking sludge outside and across the lot to the grease-only dumpster. A sparrow on a bare tree watches him pour it in, riding a branch as it bobs in the wind.” I can see it all perfectly, both the commonplace-ness of the scene and the uniqueness of this moment in time.
The strains in Manny’s life come across the pages, and we feel the burdens he labors under: his work ethic, the self-respect that made him a good manager and make him work hard, harder still when necessary to make up for the slackness of the employees; his nostalgia for his grandmother; his dutiful relationship to the girlfriend who wants him to marry her; and his yearning to understand Jacquie and why he loved her so much: “He used to marvel at the fact that out of the millions of people in the world they’d somehow found each other, whether it was an accident or destiny or the result of some logical, cascading chain of events. Now, looking out at the snow falling on the darkened cars, he thinks it’s an every bigger mystery, and like the Lobster, a waste.” He can’t understand Jacquie or why his restaurant is being closed down: he tried hard with both. And he knows he should be happy with what he does have, a loyal girlfriend and a job waiting at Olive Garden, yet he also knows there is something more that he wants, if only he could define it and reach out to grab hold of it. Manny’s appeal is that he is an everyman with a heart, trying to do the right thing and do it right, and also trying to satisfy his desire for that something more, something magical: “If one of the Powerball numbers hits, that’s the only way it could happen, that last second miracle. Or maybe it already has. Maybe it was just everyone showing up, and everyone still being here. It’s possible he’s missing the whole thing.”
O’Nan’s Manny is a very real man, his inner thoughts swirling and circling, and never concluding. He is a man with a job that has to get done; no luxury to just sit around and think but he just cannot help his mind from going back again and again to his life and his choices, and choices that have been made for him.
Every word O’Nan uses is just right, as when Jacquie “shills” to the customers or when Manny battles an old snowblower (“Fuckin’ piece of shit“). Every detail of every moment works, like the rubber band Manny holds on his wrist as a reminder but which in a moment of frustration he pitches off into the snow, no longer beholden to its message of work and duty.
This novel is slim (146 pages) and I read it twice, just relishing the words and the pace and the skill of O’Nan in giving us so completely, so cleanly, so realistically, and so beautifully, the memorable Last Night at the Lobster.
