The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin

July 31, 2019

The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin

Fiona Skinner is 102 years old, a famous poet who has agreed to give one last public reading in 2079.  In 1981, her father died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving his wife Antonia (Noni) to raise their four children (Renee, Caroline, Joe, and Fiona).  At their father’s funeral, seven-year-old Joe has a meltdown, grabs the fireplace poker, and starts smashing things in the house, particularly the photos of the family.  The adults do nothing, but the three sisters wrap their arms around him, effectively signaling the beginning of their lifelong habit of covering up for him.  Whenever Joe gets into trouble (and he does repeatedly), he calls one of his sisters.  And throughout their lives, they continually make excuses for him and clean up his messes.

Noni goes into a deep depression following her husband’s death, overwhelmed with looking after her family and her life, and neglects her children for three years (Caroline has a similar depression after they can’t find Luna).  The siblings refer to this period as The Pause, and the events of that time shape the rest of their lives.  As they grow to adulthood, it gets kind of boring hearing them blame everything on their father’s death and their mother’s depression.

The book title comes from the title of Fiona’s blog, The Last Romantic – she writes reviews of the sexual performance of her lovers (like Man #23 who she runs into at her brother’s engagement party).  The blog sounds like Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City, except more malicious and not as entertaining.  Fiona ends up falling in love with Will, Man #23, eventually marrying him - he's one of the most likeable characters in the book.

The format reminded me of Commonwealth by Ann Patchett (which I liked much better than The Last Romantics); the sisters’ obsession with their brother’s life reminded me of The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney (which I really disliked); and the 1st half of the book is far better than the 2nd half, like The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin.  It got uninteresting and strange after Joe’s “accident.”  There was a lot of repetition (Fiona and Joe talk, and then Fiona has to call Sandrine and repeat the whole conversation verbatim to her; Renee and Caroline get Joe out of serious trouble in college and we have to hear it first from Caroline, then Renee, and finally from Fiona; a conversation Fiona and Joe have is repeated two or three times).  There is a theme of climate change that runs through the book but doesn't really go anywhere.  

Regarding the mother's depression and not caring for her children:  yes, in 1981, it was possible to lose track of people or be unaware that children were being neglected.  There were no cell phones (weren’t available to the public until 1984) or Internet (the World Wide Web was launched in 1991) or social media, so unless you lived nearby or made a point of checking, there was no way of knowing how anyone else was living.  Privacy was a thing in those days.