Cowardly, greedy, obnoxious, territorial, deceitful, opportunistic: there aren’t enough obscure adjectives in the dictionary to describe the narrator of Andrew Lipstein’s “Last Resort.” What fun! A great advantage of the well-drawn weasels of fiction is that you can always find a little bit of yourself in them.
Last Resort is about a novelist who has stolen the plot of his bestseller from a story told to him by an acquaintance. If you read last year’s “The Plot” by Jean Hanff Korelitz, you’ll notice that this novel has a similar plot to that one. Given the timelines of publishing, it’s certain that the emergence of these – not identical, but let’s say twin brother – stories within months of each other is purely coincidental. But there must be something in the air that led to the double serving of this Faustian variety.
Both novels are anti-Kunstlernovel – books not about the formation of real artists, but about the self-destruction of fake artists. They are both thrillers about, above all, intellectual property. Korelitz’s book was tighter and darker. Lipstein’s is funnier. Both are incredibly entertaining.
Caleb is the Faust of “Last Resort,” an aspiring writer in his twenties who has no compelling subject matter until he is reunited with a college mate named Avi, who recounts a series of notable recent events: Greek island, doomed affair, group sex with oppressed married couple, death – which Caleb judges as an antique dealer studies the marquetry of a Louis XVI secretary. Soon, unscrupulously, Caleb expands Avi’s anecdote into a full-length novel with enough commercial viability to provide the unknown author with a flashy agent.
When this agent snoops around the manuscript, Avi – who, to Caleb’s dismay, has switched careers and now works in publishing – discovers the betrayal. The two men meet under the eye of a lawyer and come to an agreement: Avi’s name will be printed on the book, as the author, but all the money will go to Caleb. (Not being a literary agent, I was curious if this premise was realistic or outrageous. I asked an agent with considerable experience. He replied that it was “a piece but out of this world”.)
Caleb’s novel proves to be a hit, although it might be more accurate to describe what he’s written as ‘content’ – a substance designed to be digested and excreted with minimal strain on the consumer’s brain. From the very first meeting with his agent, Caleb thinks about marketing, not art: fonts (Caslon specifically – he’s kinda basic) and decorated borders and the Frankfurt Book Fair.
This is where alarm bells should ring in the reader’s head. ah! we think: Caleb is not an artist, but a career maker! And the careerist must undergo humiliation and defeat; he must be exposed as a con man; he must be dumped by a worthy woman who has mistakenly projected her real values onto him. He is also likely to be charged.
Or – should he? If Lipstein had written a less crafty book, he could have compared Caleb to a character who represented artistic purity, whatever that may be. But everyone here is somewhere on the grifter spectrum, including the real people (Avi, doomed wife, oppressed married couple) on whom Caleb’s characters are based.
Lipstein seems ambivalent, as he must be, about the compromises required of anyone looking to make money selling words. It is difficult to innocently enter a professional writing career. The pool of aspirants is too large and the number of jobs too small, and of those jobs just a teaspoon is rewarding enough to pay for things like rent. But Lipstein is not saying that one has to be heavenly lucky, or have to be satanic principled, or both to “make it.”
For example, Caleb is not a bad genius. An evil genius would not send self-accusing text messages (first rule of being evil: don’t write anything), nor would he fail to change the names of the people he is writing. What type of doofus fails to cover his tracks in such obvious ways? Well, exactly the type of doofus that Caleb is. His hackiness as a writer is a reflection of his hackiness as a moral agent – or perhaps it works in the opposite direction. Caleb is cheerful about his shortcomings, admitting that “I’m not the type to dot my i’s and even dry my back completely after a shower.”
In addition to a merry streak, Caleb has a vicious streak, a petty, and an immoderate streak, and Lipstein milks the comedy of these traits almost as well as Kingsley Amis did in “Lucky Jim.” Caleb notes that Avi looked “like James Dean if James Dean was a little inbred.” A Nissan Altima is “the color of a wet dog.” The Muzak pumped through his co-working space is made up of “Top 40-esque songs seemingly devoid of choruses, bridges and memorable hooks, played at a volume that could be described as enough.” Lipstein even makes an Amis-level observation on the subject of drunkenness: “I was at the drunkenness stage when certain footsteps surprised you.”
It’s a bit obvious to pinpoint the underlying fears of “Last Resort” – deception, vanity – in the well-documented and rapidly growing reluctance of readers to lend credibility to the media. Novelists are not ‘the media’. (Thank God.) But it’s true that almost all kinds of authors are in a losing skirmish to maintain their status, and their authority is so diminished that we should probably come up with another name for them.
The coexistence of “The Plot” and “Last Resort” could be a random incident—the way “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact” both surfaced in the summer of 1998—or it could mark the arrival of a whole genre that allegorizes the professional writer’s suspicion that he might be a con man. The main narrative distinction between the novels lies not in whether the cunning writers are punished for their sins – they are, they are – but in how. For one author, stealing someone’s story is an unforgivable desecration. For others a minor crime.