04/22/08
Text: Scott Indrisek
Photographers: Tobias Everke
Fiona Maazel’s Last Last Chance is one strange, beautiful novel. It’s the most shattering fictionalization of addiction and recovery since David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest—yet the narrator’s story is set against the outbreak of a global superplague that threatens to decimate humanity. And lest you think the subject matter’s too grim for a summer read, Last Last Chance is overflowing with a gallow’s humor that makes the impending end of the world almost palatable. Few modern novels have brought together brainy introspection and pure nail-biting entertainment so well. We asked Maazel, who lives in New York, to talk about her debut.
Many critics have spoken of your novel as being part of a recent trend—“apocalyptic fiction,” for lack of a better term. How do you feel about that trend, and do you think Last Last Chance has much in common with it?
I actually hadn't noticed a trend until someone asked me about it, though probably [Cormac McCarthy’s] The Road, for its genius and sway, is a trend all on its own. In any case, I don't think Last Last Chance is actually "apocalyptic fiction," in large measure because there's no apocalypse on the ground and, thematically, the very idea of apocalypse, or finality, is dispatched by some principles advanced by the novel as it goes along.
There's a lot of talk about ‘cycles’ and ‘reprise’ in the book—stories that keep coming back, people who keep coming back—and a general sense that nothing ever really ends. There are no last chances; you get as many as you want, over and over. So even though there's this plague romping across the country, it's a kind of bubonic plague, which, historically, tends to assert itself every few centuries. Even the slate-wiper comes back. In the end, I wasn't so interested in the metaphor of apocalypse--which justifiably proxies for a lot of anxiety I imagine people are feeling today; it certainly seems like the world's toying with about nine different ways to die--but in how people wrangle with the pressure and gift of having chance after chance to make things work despite the pretense of doom overhanging their lives.
Why the decision to make this a story that's both about the impending end of the world and an addict's struggles toward sobriety? How much can we safely assume is drawn from your own life, without conflating narrator and author?
I wanted to dramatize the hopeless and somewhat pitiful solipsism of addiction and figured a good way to do this was to build up a national crisis whose stakes the addicts in the novel would dwarf and maybe even ignore altogether. Of course, with people dying and the news blasting the latest 24/7, even the biggest narcissist is going to notice his/her narcissism and begin to feel terrible about it, which is itself an ego exercise. So in the end, the whole thing did the double duty of letting [the addicts] wallow in self-regard and disgust, and struggle to surmount themselves. Struggle and fail, and struggle some more. I was thinking this made for good fiction. I hope I was right.
As for the rest, there's not much to be gleaned about my life from the novel. I did a lot of research into everything--chickens, plague, reincarnation, Norse mythology, crack. I certainly feel affinity with a lot of the characters and have probably shared, at one time or another, some of their despair. A fiction teacher of mine, possibly quoting someone else, once said that even when you're in the midst of the most horrible tragedy, some part of your brain is thinking: I can use this. So yeah, there's always going to be that moment when you plumb your own well, though what often comes up is an experience of hurt that's just generic enough, you can recalibrate it to suit your needs. I probably did a lot of that.
Buy Last Last Chance here, and then visit the book’s official website.
