Last Last Chance

"Maazel's book has enough event—and enough eccentricity—to torpedo your average novel. But Last Last Chance isn't your average novel, thanks in no small part to Maazel's funny, lacerating prose. The book fits squarely in the tradition of novels about the wealthy and dissolute, but ultimately it's less John Cheever than Denis Johnson—the Denis Johnson of Jesus' Son, with its drug-addled narrators—though Maazel's voice is more caffeinated, more fueled by attitude . . . and more prone to hectoring . . . Maazel is particularly adept at conveying the desperation of the addict, how everything—even a potentially world-ending plague—is eclipsed by the need for a fix."—Joshua Henkin, The New York Times

"Crisp dialogue, brisk pacing, dark yet compassionate comedy . . . A remarkable feat of the imagination."—Newsday

"Moving, buoyant, and utterly true . . . Last Last Chance isn't your average novel, thanks in no small part to Maazel's funny, lacerating prose . . . Maazel is such a fine, precise writer, she can convince the reader of almost anything."—The New York Times Book Review

"Maazel writes with a kind of ecstatic swagger--freewheeling and cocksure, intelligent and loopy and funny as hell."—Slate

"Lithe prose, crackling wit, and a deep appreciation for the absurdity, spirtual poverty, and occasional nobility of Americans in a time of extreme crisis."—Time Out New York

"Read this book now for the sentence-by-sentence brilliance of Maazel's inimitable voice . . . Maazel was born in 1975, but her imagination has been on fire for a thousand years."—Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End

"When a lethal strain of virus vanishes from a lab in Washington, D.C., letting a super-plague loose on the world, Lucy Clark's father, a chemist, is blamed for its release. He promptly commits suicide, leaving his incredibly dysfunctional family to deal with the aftermath. The characters of Lucy and her mother, Isifrid, half-sister Hannah, and grandmother Agneth are developed in a hilarious fashion as we learn of their eccentricities. Lucy works in a kosher chicken processing plant. Isifrid sells high-end ladies' hats and studies Norse pagan theology. Hannah is obsessed with the plague and is a staunch believer in Christian fundamentalism. Agneth believes in reincarnation, and in Last Last Chance, her beliefs are proven to be right. Lucy's lover, Stanley, possesses his dead wife's frozen eggs, and they are interviewing for an appropriate surrogate to become the incubator for their yet-to-be born conceived children. From the first pages, drug addiction is also developed skillfully as a central supporting character. The author weaves the face of a drug addict into every story line in the book with deadly accuracy in detail. In the opening chapter, Lucy, an addict, is making plans to attend her oldest and best friend's wedding after a period of alienation. She goes to great lengths to buy just the right outfits for herself and Stanley and practices what she will say to her friend, Kam, and her financée when they are reunited. Unfortunately, she learns all too late that she has missed the wedding, because she was high when she looked at the invitation and misread the date. After this mistake, Lucy binges on drugs and eventually enters rehab at the insistence of her mother, who is also an addict. Lucy is in rehab when the super-plague surfaces and thousands of people begin to die. Her mother brings the family to rehab to hide from authorities who are seeking information about her dead husband's involvement in releasing the virus. She brings drugs, which Lucy helps herself to. When they are caught, Lucy's mother faces the painful fact that she must come to terms with her own addiction. Last Last Chance is creative, entertaining, and honest. Mental health professionals, especially drug counselors, will both enjoy and learn from this comic novel. The story explores the extent to which drug addiction influences and devastates people's lives, while leaving the door open for hope. This is seen when Lucy takes advantage of the chance to rehabilitate herself—in this case, her last last chance."—Sharron Perry, Psychiatric Services

"A mordantly comic debut novel about plague, addiction and botched romance. First, there's Lucy. She's an addict. She's tried 12-step programs, rehab and working on a kosher chicken farm, but nothing seems to help. Then there's her mother, who is also an addict and even less committed to sobering up than Lucy. There's her grandmother, Agneth, who believes in reincarnation, and her preteen half sister, Hannah, who spends her free time studying infectious diseases and hanging out with white-supremacist fundamentalist Christians. There's also Stanley, a co-worker from the chicken farm, who is trying to find someone to gestate his dead wife's frozen gametes. There are the many dead, yet present, souls who inhabit (sort of) the novel's living characters. Then there's Lucy's father, who recently killed himself after a deadly virus went missing from his lab. Finally, there's the rest of the world, already enduring an age of anxiety and now just beginning to panic about the 'superplague' that's on the loose. Lucy is a loser and rather addled, but she's an engaging narrator, and her views on addiction and recovery are frequently funny and insightful. She stops into a 12-step meeting just after the virus has started to take its first victims and offers this assessment: 'The meeting goes on. No one mentions superplague, but then no one would. We are entirely too self-centered to let such matters upstage miseries of our own devising.' This observation captures much of the action in the novel. Maazel deftly depicts how routine trumps crisis, and how personal dramas tend to take precedence over global catastrophes. Lucy, for example, is far more angst-ridden over a failed romance than she is about looming mass extinction. Killer viruses, when they appear in fiction, are generally the catalyst for fast-paced thrills, and there is a certain off-kilter appeal to Maazel's slower, more intimate and aimless approach."—Kirkus Reviews

"Lucy is a drug addict, as is her mother. Her grandmother believes in reincarnation. Her half-sister believes in research and Jesus. Her father is believed to have released an incurable strain of the plague that is killing capriciously across the United States. Lucy, in her way, hopes to get drug-free, but her pessimistic outlook, her chronic depression, her crazy family, and the world that surrounds her all conspire to keep her from achieving that goal. She can't have the man she loves; she doesn't appreciate the man she has. After a wild stay at a Texas rehab, Lucy finds that her sense of the world has shifted. When her mother dies, and Lucy 'inherits' her best friend's baby, her transformation to cautious optimism is complete. First novelist Maazel's descriptive powers are strong, and she captures the alternating hope and despair of her complex and quirky characters as they confront the unknown and the unknowable. Recommended."—Joanna M. Burkhardt, School Library Journal

"A sprawling debut with an alternately absurdist and sardonic tone, Maazel's debut follows the tribulations of Lucy, a young drug addict who works at a New York City kosher chicken plant. Lucy's father was a Centers for Disease Control bigwig who's recently committed suicide, presumably due to fallout from his perceived role in an outbreak of plague that is spreading across America. Her mother, Isifrid, is a crack-addled gazillionaire, while grandmother Agneth talks incessantly of reincarnation, and younger half-sister Hannah harbors a huge obsession with disease. As the novel opens, Lucy sets off with her alcoholic, over-50 co-worker, Stanley, to attend the wedding of her best friend, Kam—who is marrying Eric, whom Lucy met first and fell in love with. After some hijinks, Lucy heads to a rehab facility in Texas. Over the course of Lucy's wild road trip, Maazel, daughter of conductor Loren, delivers some electric writing: the novel is brimming with wit, ideas and delightfully screwball humor."—Publishers Weekly