By the time Lucy Clark, the protagonist of Fiona Maazel’s first novel, “Last Last Chance,” enters drug rehabilitation midway through the book, she has been through a lot. At 29, Lucy is in rehab for the seventh time, and less than a year earlier her father, an official at the Centers for Disease Control, had vials of superplague stolen from his lab and committed suicide. Lucy’s mother, the chief executive of a multimillion-dollar hat company, is a drug addict herself. (She’s first seen “crawling around the floor, looking for anything white and crumbly. … She’d smoke talcum powder if it was there.”) Lucy’s half sister, born of an extramarital affair, is, at 12, obsessed with disease (she appears to know more about superplague than the C.D.C. itself), and Lucy’s 84-year-old grandmother has taken to wearing surgical masks (she buys them in bulk) when she’s not channeling her past lives (she’s teaching herself Japanese, in the belief that it will help her when she comes back).
“Then there’s Lucy herself. Her true love, Eric, has married her best friend; another man has given her a sexually transmitted disease; and she’s been caught in flagrante with her mother’s acupuncturist, which is what landed her in rehab in the first place — though not without a pit stop in upstate New York, where she has been working on the assembly line at ZOG Kosher Chicken’s slaughterhouse. There she befriends (and eventually becomes lovers with) the longtime pluckhouse supervisor, Stanley Gensch. Stanley, an alcoholic himself (he confesses to putting beer in the cow trough so as not to have to drink alone), killed his wife in a drunken driving accident and, having frozen her eggs, is interviewing surrogates to carry their child. And that’s only the half of it. Maazel’s book has enough event — and enough eccentricity — to torpedo your average novel.”
