Final flings
“The Last Laugh” is a sexagenarian romp featuring four women who escape to a Greek island for a year. In Lynn Freed’s new novel and ninth book, characters crave a break from adult children and, perhaps, from facing the next stage of life. Her dramatic scenes of stalking, adultery, murder and reincarnation make “The Last Laugh” a superb option for a comic thriller movie.
Each vagabond is on the cusp of 70. Ruth is a California writer originally from South Africa; Dania, also transplanted to California, is a psychotherapist from Israel; and Bess, half-sister of Ruth, is a woman of many passports. The urbane women have thought of almost everything, including a rental house for the inevitable family invasions. One of their first surprises is the arrival of Gladdy, Bess’ childhood pal, who acts as a cross between friend and servant, insisting on shopping and cooking for the group. Gladdy, also 69, is Zulu.
Ruth recently killed off Stefan Gripp, hero of her detective novels, so she can finally retire. Dania has only a few remaining clients, who consult by phone, and one troubled patient who starts to blackmail her. Bess, whose main identity seems to be bonne vivante, quickly takes up with a married Greek taxi driver. Gladdy, meanwhile, is the most successful at adapting to Greece and making local friends.
Aging is suddenly a hot topic in books as well as TV and film. Freed’s depiction of the constraints and liberation of the “golden years” recalls moments in Margaret Drabble’s “The Dark Flood Rises,” Kathleen Rooney’s “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk,” Ali Smith’s “Autumn” and Cathleen Shine’s “They May Not Mean To, But They Do.” Freed nimbly dramatizes the strengths and flaws of the women as they discover freedom from work and family.
Ruth’s magazine column, “Granny Au Go Go,” is interspersed throughout the narrative she writes about shopping, cooking, communal life, cultural differences. “One small cause of relief in being away from America is that no one ... seems moved to declare at the close of every telephone conversation, ‘Don’t forget the dry cleaning! Love you!’ ”
As months pass, the women learn to negotiate each other’s foibles and recognize some of their own. A former lover of Ruth’s arrives, jeopardizing the future of the island idyll. Bess and Dionysos scheme to escape from his vengeful wife. Wendy, the menacing patient, appears in person to confront Dania. Meanwhile Gladdy is attending church, learning local recipes and planning a joint birthday bash.
Despite growing limitations, they all relish new freedoms. Ruth celebrates the waning of desire. “Twenty or even ten years earlier, I wouldn’t even have tried to talk myself out of stopping with him at the hotel, as he was now asking me to do, so awful would have been my terror of regret if I did not.”
Eventually, Ruth gets weary of her column and asks Bess to take over. She is abashed by her zaftig housemate’s candor: “Try having meal after meal with women who keep saying, ‘No more for me, thanks!’ ... And the preserved oranges I keep buying at the bakery because Ruth loves them? ‘No more for me, thanks.’ Meanwhile, I see her pulling in her stomach when she looks at herself in the mirror. The trouble is, she can’t pull in the bags under her eyes or lift the sagging jowls.”
When the magazine editor asks them to conclude the column on an upbeat note, Ruth is stymied. “So when I’m confronted with the sort of positive thinking that pervades So Long, it makes me want to hang myself . ... If we were talking about joy here, real joy, or even ordinary happiness — those unexpected moments, or stretches of moments, that don’t arrive on order, well — that’s a gorgeous subject ... that I don’t think would be at home in a magazine like So Long.”
Sometimes the exuberant burlesque is hard to follow because the women command a complicated retinue of minor characters. Freed wisely opens the novel with descriptions of the 19 “Dramatis Personae,” a list to which this reader frequently returned.
Clearly, Freed had a blast zipping through the adventures of these spirited, droll women. She excels at their frank, snappy repartee. And she surprises readers to the end, with an epilogue launching the four friends on new escapades in their 70s.