The Last Laugh: A Novel

by Lynn Freed

Overview

A witty new novel about three self-proclaimed “old bags” who run off to a Greek island

Since their children left home, Ruth, Dania, and Bess have grown used to living wonderfully free lives. Only now they’re beset by children again—this time, their grandchildren. In order to escape, they decide to run away to Greece together for a year.

At first, settled on a glorious island, barefoot and contented, they think they’ve rediscovered the wheel. But then things begin to go awry. Dionysus, a local poet, takes up with Bess, at least until his wife gets wind of things. Dania, a therapist, is being stalked by one of her patients. And Ruth’s ex-lover turns up out of the blue, closely followed by the man who lost Bess her fortune. It doesn’t help when the children and grandchildren also start turning up whenever they feel like it. As Bess writes in one of Ruth’s weekly “Granny à Go Go” columns, this is not an Enchanted April sort of year.

Lynn Freed’s previous novels have received rave reviews everywhere from The New York Times Book Review (“Makes us laugh while packing, finally, a punch”), to the Los Angeles Times Book Review (“Deeply absorbing and ambitious . . . Astonishingly vivid”). In The Last Laugh she returns with a beautifully written and funny novel about money, sex, friendship, and the pleasures and perils of children.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250182104
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	07/03/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	946,293
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lynn Freed is the author of several novels, including The Last Laugh and Home Ground, a collection of short stories, and essay collections. Her honors include the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award for fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two PEN/O. Henry awards, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Born in South Africa, she now lives in Northern California.

Editorial Reviews

PRAISE FOR THE LAST LAUGH

“Beautifully paced . . . If on it’s surface The Last Laugh is a warts-and-all repudiation of the late-in-life female empowerment yarn as typified by the movie Enchanted April . . .the gimlet-eyed Freed is intent on something deeper and more unsettling . . . Freed’s candor works to lift the veil off the misperception that life after 60 consists mostly of conversations about sciatica or ceaseless and slightly abject devotion to a tiny, shivery dog.” —Henry Alford, The New York Times Book Review

"Smart and sprightly in style . . . Hilarious . . . a Campari spritzer of a novel: bubbly and colorful, but with a underlying note of bitterness to add satisfying complexity." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR

“Fast-moving and laced with salty wit, this is a smart, funny summer read” —People

"Superb . . . Freed nimbly dramatizes the strengths and flaws of the women as they discover freedom from work and family." —San Francisco Chronicle

“[A] perfect summer read for anyone who loved Delia Ephron’s Siracusa or Emma Straub’s The Vacationers. Freed’s narrative style is delightful . . . And the characters are relatable, bickering and compromising and loving each other all the same. Sun-dappled and sea-splashed, this is the best type of escapism.” —Booklist

"[A] slyly delivered version of a novel of women's self-actualization . . . Fraught relationships between mothers and daughters, grandmothers and grandchildren, and men and women are explored and detailed against the backdrop of usually perfect scenery . . . Replete with references to Greek mythology, Freed's modern retelling of a timeless tale of self-fulfillment wanders into surprising territory along the way." —Kirkus

“Drily whimsical.” —Publishers Weekly

"I devoured The Last Laugh in one delightful sitting. With fine style, a true heart, and coruscating wit, Freed simultaneously skewers and celebrates old age, friendship, family, romance, and work, and into the bargain delivers the most brilliant cliché-busting riff ever written." —Ann Patty, author of Living with a Dead Language

“Hilarious and wise, this sublime novel shows us how the familiar is transformed by explosive events, in a world where bonds are deepened and lifelong mistakes are redeemed. The Last Laugh is a delight.” —Maria Flook, author of Mothers and Lovers and the New York Times bestseller Invisible Eden


PRAISE FOR LYNN FREED

“Like any successful star, [Freed] knows her strengths and how to employ them.”
—Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review

“[Freed] wonderfully carries off that hardest of all literary effects—it feels effortless and therefore absolutely real.” —Elaina Richardson, Elle

“Lynn Freed is a beautiful writer, dead-on brilliant, rich in humor, possessing a dark and comforting wisdom.” —Anne Lamott

From the Publisher

…beautifully paced…If on its surface The Last Laugh is a warts-and-all repudiation of the late-in-life female empowerment yarn as typified by the movies Enchanted April and Shirley Valentine, the gimlet-eyed Freed is intent on something deeper and more unsettling. Can we ever really absent ourselves, even briefly, from the important people in our lives? Is it lunacy to think we have an essential self—a self that exists outside our relationships to other people? Why is freedom so terrifying?…In the end, Freed's candor works to lift the veil off the misperception that life after 60 consists mostly of conversations about sciatica or ceaseless and slightly abject devotion to a tiny, shivery dog.

The New York Times Book Review - Henry Alford

05/08/2017
Three “mad old bags,” all pushing 70, pool their resources to rent a house on a Greek island for a year in the drily whimsical latest by Freed (The Servants’ Quarters). Narrator Ruth, a South African transplanted to the United States, has just given up writing a series of detective novels, and pens a magazine column about their Greek adventures called “Granny Au Go Go.” Her half-sister, Bess, devotes herself to shopping and a fling with a local taxi driver, and Israeli Dania, a psychotherapist with a flair for misusing the English language (e.g., “Scrap the bottom of the barrel”), fends off a former patient with blackmail on her mind. Freed juggles a cast of interrelated characters that runs into the dozens, the most notable of whom is Gladness, Bess’s Zulu best friend and the former nanny to her children, and which also includes several former still-hunky lovers. If the various children and grandchildren who pop in and out, testing their elders’ patience, sometimes blur together, the core relationships stay strong, making for a pleasant and diverting read. Ruth’s columns, which occasionally reveal more than she intends about her housemates, add humor. (July)

Publishers Weekly

02/15/2017
Deciding on a year in Greece when the grandchildren start descending like locusts, three friends find that their sun-kissed sabbatical comes with complications. Hangers-on follow both Dania and Ruth abroad, while Bess enjoys a romance with local poet Dionysus until his wife barges in. And wouldn't you know the children and grandchildren start turning up, too. From the inaugural winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Library Journal

2017-04-18
Greece is the word for a trio of almost-septuagenarian women determined to enjoy an idyll free of family and romantic entanglements…or is it?Ruth, Dania, and Bess, the triad at the center of Freed's (The Servants' Quarters, 2009, etc.) slyly delivered version of a novel of women's self-actualization, retreat to a Greek isle for a yearlong experiment in communal living undisturbed by children, grandchildren, lovers, or others. Ruth, a South African expatriate and mystery novelist, narrates the trio's saga, directly and via journal excerpts and magazine columns chronicling the sojourn. The column, optimistically entitled "Granny Au Go Go," provides Ruth and her half sister—the indolent Bess—with an opportunity to "tell it like it is" for women of a certain age as well as a way to illuminate the differences between the truisms of later life and the stereotypes of grannyhood. Dania, a kibbutz psychologist given to malapropisms, balances out the threesome with an apparent self-absorption that masks a troubling reality. When snakes—in the form of family, friends, and lovers—invade the proverbial Eden created by the three, the carefully crafted equilibrium among the group is balanced and rebalanced and balanced again. Comic relief is provided by the (often painfully earnest) politically correct edits a faceless editor provides for Ruth's columns, but macabre and antic episodes may distract the reader's attention from Freed's observations about women's lives and second-wave feminism woven throughout the tale. Fraught relationships between mothers and daughters, grandmothers and grandchildren, and men and women are explored and detailed against the backdrop of usually perfect scenery, but it is the sometimes-madcap behavior of Freed's characters that may be the takeaway for many readers. Replete with references to Greek mythology, Freed's modern retelling of a timeless tale of self-fulfillment wanders into surprising territory along the way.

Kirkus Reviews