[In the following review, Craig argues that The Last Resort is a “masterpiece,” contending that Lurie writes with great wit and attention to detail.]

The Last Resort refers to both a location and an action. Wilkie Walker, an eminent naturalist, has come to Key West, an exotic seaside resort at the far end of Florida, to commit suicide. His reason for doing so is that he suspects he has colonic cancer, and does not wish his wife Jenny to know he is a dying man.

If this were Tolstoy or Mann, we would be pretty sure of the outcome: the doomed hero, after much private suffering, would walk into the sea and drown. That, in the male canon, is what literature is supposed to be about. This, however, is Alison Lurie, who never confuses the serious with the solemn. In the past she has written about love, friendship and the relationship between art and life; now, she has written about what age, sickness and the intimations of mortality do to human beings. In doing so, she has produced a masterpiece.

The particular joy of Lurie's writing is her perception that the most intelligent and intolerant are often those whose grasp of events is most faulty: in other words, the very people who are most likely to enjoy her novels are allowed a god-like vision of their own flaws. The only living writer to hold a candle to Jane Austen, her irony is tempered by a deeper humanity.

Here is Wilkie, musing on a retirement home: “It was clear to him that though Skytop resembled an upmarket motel, it had deeper parallels to an expensive internment camp. If you lived there, you couldn't help but be aware that every so often one of the inmates would be taken away to die slowly in what was euphemistically called a ‘nursing facility’. You wouldn't know when your turn was coming, but the longer you stayed, the more likely it would become that you would be chosen. And of course eventually everyone would be chosen.”

In counterpoint to such Larkinesque gloom, we have the sentimental education of Wilkie's beautiful, conventional wife. As endangered a species as those Wilkie studies, Jenny has devoted her life to her husband, contributing to his work as unobtrusively as she has to his comfort. Bewildered and depressed by his sudden coldness, she is rescued while swimming by Lee (one of Lurie's recurring characters, now running a women-only rooming house). Lee falls deeply in love; Jenny perhaps less so. Unlike the lesbians satirised in The Truth about Lorin Jones, this passion, and indeed all the homosexual relationships in the novel, are presented with exceptional tenderness and tact.

How Lee's friend Jaco, infected with Aids by his dead millionaire lover, fends off his mercenary aunt and drippy cousin, how a ghastly ex-beatnik poet inadvertently saves Wilkie's life and how Wilkie's cancer turns out to be something hilariously different from what he fears are things readers will have to discover for themselves. If you buy one novel in hardback this summer, buy this. Every single page is a joy. It is so witty, so Mozartian, so much the product of a lifetime of diamond-sharp observation and experience that its art can be overlooked only by those blinded by testosterone.

The Last Resort is Lurie's first novel for ten years; impossible not to fear that this, like Wilkie's book, is a kind of swansong. She has the perfect pitch which is both the gift and the craft of the consummate artist, breathing new life into the comedy of manners, and refusing to barter all the things that make her so readable (characters, plots, jokes, fairy tales, lucidity, intelligence, joy) for a more “literary” style. One fears that even now she is not appreciated for the genius she is. Despite her Pulitzer for Foreign Affairs, it is tempting to think her work bears the same relation to the rest of modern literature that Key West does to America—a place of recreation, a paradisal holiday from the mundane. It is only after we have left it that we realise, actually, this last resort is life.