I like
The Last Resort's book cover a lot. I haven't read the book, but I can still talk about the cover! It's bold design was by Michelle McMillan, whom I attempted Googling in order to locate more of her work but, lo, the world is apparently full of many Michelle McMillans, and I could not pinpoint the Michelle McMillan, cover designer, I was searching for, assuming she was even listed among the several entries and pages of Michelle McMillans available to click on.
Henry Holt and Company put out an odd sized hardcover first printing -- 5 3/4" x 7 1/2" -- though that seems to be the norm for the publishing house, founded in 1866, publishing differently, more artistically.
The Last Resort looks almost square. Penguin Classics stand a quarter inch taller. The idea of the overplayed "American Dream" dead ending off a decadent highway built literally atop the ocean (what hubris, these dead end Americans, who think they can drive on water, let alone walk on it!) just west of Key West was a fresh image-take on the American dream's demise. From the back cover of
The Last Resort:
"
Streets and shops and restaurants were crowded with adults dressed like children at play, in colorful shorts, T-shirts, sneakers, and sandals. Their garb was the outward sign that for these few days or weeks they were free to enjoy and indulge themselves, like kids on vacation. They had no responsibilities or chores: they did not cook for themselves or make their own beds. They stayed up late at night, and ate when they liked, preferring the childish foods disapproved of by parents and health experts: cheeseburgers, hot dogs, sodas, chips, fries, pizza, and candy."
The quote echoes David Foster Wallace's observations regarding a nation whose ultimate collective dream it sure seems, whether they're working stiffs or retired CEOs, is to be "pampered" (think Pampers!), brought back to a state of Depends diapers (dependency!) or -- infantilized into some sickening infinite infancy, in other words -- that he collected as the title essay in
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, about his week on board a luxury cruise liner, that, coincidentally, shipped out not far from the southern Florida setting of
The Last Resort and also around the same time that
Alison Lurie published her novel. Brilliant minds, perhaps. I think perhaps, too, I need to actually read this novel of Alison Lurie's,
The Last Resort, and not only because a beloved song by a California band also called "The Last Resort" (whose
lyrics found the American Dream ending in Malibu and then Hawaii), happens to be one of my all time favorite songs regarding the American Dream's manifest metastasizing, but because the novel in its own right -- at the time the first novel Alison Lurie had published in ten years -- sounds like my perfect savory cup of social commentary.
(more autographs)
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