[In the following excerpt, Mantel lauds The Last Resort but cites shortcomings in the novel's supporting cast and narrative structure.]

It is dangerous to stray outside New England, to places where the chill predictabilities of winter are overlapped by the warm ocean currents of self-indulgence and self-deceit: to places where the bracing necessities of shoveling snow are replaced by the velvet and slippery deceptions of bodily warmth. Harry DeKroll entertains mild regrets for Key West in the days when it offered “the great escape,” for days when easily available mind-altering substances adjusted reality more effectively than today's intake of con leche and Oprah. Harry the Housesitter is the narrator of Ann Beattie's new story “The Siamese Twins Go Snorkeling.” He stands by and watches someone else get a life (and employ him to service it), while he himself is occupied with work on “Great American Novel about drifters in Key West; yes, it will have been written before, but ne'er so well expressed.”

Alison Lurie, by contrast, has invented a character [in The Last Resort] who in Key West is at odds with everyone around him. He alone has a stern purpose: it is suicide. For others, day devolves sweetly into day, heat and luxuriance feeding upon themselves, and if—like one character—you are crippled and constricted by arthritis, you think of Key West as a lap into which you can tumble, a salving mama; or if you are gay and HIV-positive, and watching your blood-count the way people in harsher climates watch the barometer, you can choose the moment when the waters will take you under. But Wilkie Walker is the man whom the waves refuse. His egotism is like a life vest, constantly bobbing back, floating him nose-to-nose with the possibility of his professional failure and washing him against the wreck of a twenty-five-year marriage.

His wife Jenny is now forty-six, and Wilkie is seventy. They married just after she graduated, and the marriage saved her from aimlessness. She wanted to devote her life to someone, and Wilkie needed her devotion. At that time he had two failed marriages behind him. Attractive but emotionally selfish, he is a man of high intellectual attainment but scant practical ability. He would rather delegate the business of shopping or household repairs or balancing a checkbook. Besides taking care of his day-to-day needs, Jenny has been his faithful secretary, researcher, in effect co-writer. She has always minimized her role, and allowed Wilkie to take full credit.

As well as a solipsist, Wilkie is a naturalist, and a popular author. He has been working on a book called The Copper Beech, and it is almost finished. Only one chapter is needed, and the book has already been announced in his publisher's catalog. It is to be the culmination of his life's work, drawing together all his interests and concerns. One can easily see that this could be a fateful moment in a writer's life. Because after it, what is there left to do? The writer puts down the pen: he dies, artistically and perhaps actually.

So it is no surprise to learn that Wilkie is dragging his feet. He feels forced to review, to examine his life's work. Is it possible that he has done more harm than good, distracting himself and other people from serious scientific issues, encouraging them in sentimental anthropomorphism? He fears “he had made his point so well that it had become banal.” His books have been taken up by teachers and his environmentalist message passed down the generations. Like many popularizers, he detests his fans; he feels they have taken his work from him and distorted its messages. He is dismayed to find he is “quoted everywhere by those Family Values creeps.” And now the animal rights activists regard him as outmoded, and eco-warriors have stolen his thunder.

All this—his feeling of purposelessness, his sourness at the loss of his reputation, his fear of useless old age—crystallize in Wilkie's conviction that he has bowel cancer. He is determined not to suffer a lingering, humiliating death. Suicide seems the way out, but wouldn't that hurt Jenny? Possibly the best thing would be to arrange himself a fatal “accident.” He believes she could cope with that, just about. The Last Resort now becomes the story of Wilkie's search for death, and its maddening ways of baffling and eluding him.

This is thin ice for a comic writer. Alison Lurie glides over it with elegant expertise. This is her first novel in ten years. Throughout her long career she has struck a perfect balance, as scathing observer of personal relationships and as satirist of the wider society. And so it is in this book. Her wryness, her poise, the painful smiles her text elicits remind one often of Muriel Spark, but she has a fuller humanity and less innate ferocity; shrewd but never shrewish, she has, perhaps, more liking for her characters. She brings the reader into a quick intimacy with them, and does it without fuss; her creations register sharply on the page. She doesn't proffer judgments, but she gives the reader the evidence to form her own. Wilkie is not a foolish figure. He is treated with something better than sympathy—with fairness.

It was Jenny's helpful idea that the Walkers should winter in Key West. She thought it would reenergize them—but as the days pass, she begins to feel despondent and useless. Wilkie is not working, so she is not. He is brooding, snapping at her, shutting himself up alone for hours but making no progress with his final chapter. His attitude undermines her and taps into her deepest insecurities. Is she good enough for him? Was she ever good enough? This devoted wife has very little life of her own. Jenny's friends, of course, accuse her of being a “walking anachronism.” They get angry on her behalf, believing Wilkie exploits her. But “feminism had done nothing for her except make her chosen life seem peculiar and estrange her from her friends.” It's clear that Lurie is not on the side of these commentators, with their simplistic, prescriptive views, so intrusive and useless when applied to the mystery that is a long marriage. On the other hand, she catches very deftly the emotional tone of a woman enmeshed in such a marriage, whose instinct is first to refer everything, however personal and painful, to her spouse, and who in fact does not seem to have a separate identity. When she goes swimming in the ocean and is stung by a man-of-war, her reaction is “My husband will think I'm a total idiot.”

The man-of-war incident is a turning point for Jenny. Floundering in pain, drinking in salt water, she is rescued by Lee, the proprietor of a women-only guest house. She goes to work part-time at the guest house and has an affair with Lee. The reader is given a clear sense of Lee's physical presence, but her character is not convincingly developed; she is far too good to be true. There are several second-rank characters in the book whose purpose fails to clarify, and who loaf about like unwanted extras on a film set. Yet there are two comic triumphs among the minor actors. Barbie is the estranged wife of a Republican congressman who is having an affair with a showgirl. She has come to Key West to sort out her feelings, and—again—with the background intention of drowning herself if life gets unbearable. Damp ineptitude pervades her life. She has never been able to manage anything properly—not even to get born again in the Lord: “… A couple of times she had tried to put her life into the hands of Jesus, but it had never worked out.”

She has, however, an unexpected talent for small appliance repairs, and is able to fix Lee's toaster while contemplating annihilation. A gushingly sentimental fan of Wilkie's, she is saved from death by a suddenly discovered need to Save the Manatee.

Barbie's mother Myra—a bullying grande dame—is an off-stage presence for much of the book, and is trailed extensively before she appears. Can she possibly be as bad as the reputation that precedes her? When she does appear, with “a voice that had some of the characteristics of a leaf-shredder,” we realize that Lurie knew exactly how to play her in; we are in the presence of a memorable monster.

Meanwhile, Wilkie's plans are going badly. There are just too many people wanting to drown themselves, in Key West. He has to control carefully the circumstances of his accident, not only for the sake of plausibility, but because he is worried about his posthumous reputation. But death is not at Wilkie's orders, and will not come at his prompting. Death, in fact, is laughing at him. And so massive is his anger that Jenny begins to feel she hates him. Alison Lurie teases out each paradox in their situation. The novel itself is something of a paradox: a novel about death, in which the author is enjoying herself. Merciless as ever in nailing pretension and self-deceit, Lurie treats the risky subjects of aging and mortality with the ironic detachment that is her trademark. The Last Resort is a melancholy book, which wears its melancholy with a jaunty air, and there is not a clumsy word in it.

Yet it is unlikely that this eighth novel will be seen as Lurie's best book. One weakness is the unsupportive nature of the supporting cast, the multiplication of characters with no real part to play. The other weakness is structural. After Wilkie's discovery—no surprise to the reader—that he has a perfectly sound digestive tract, he has to get used to the idea of living again. At this point, some three hundred pages in, the story loses some of its grip. It was the successive suicide attempts and their thwarting, the successive installments of the farce, that kept the narrative patterned. All the same, the reader is sufficiently involved with the characters to want to know how they will make their various reconciliations with circumstance. Wilkie's mind begins to move on familiar lines, as he contemplates another year, another book, another popular hit. “Manny the manatee. Or did that sound too Jewish?”

During the time he calls “while I was so preoccupied,” he has exposed his own nature and alienated his wife. Wilkie will not learn from his experience. He is probably beyond learning. But Jenny has negotiated herself into a brighter future.

Alison Lurie has a light touch. She uses no shock effects. She is an uncomfortable writer in the way that Jane Austen is uncomfortable: the comparison has been drawn before, and this book strengthens it. There is the same beadiness of eye, the same almost imperceptible smile, and the unspoken questions, left hanging in the air. However small the canvas, her characters inhabit a complete moral universe.