Book Review: Last Night at the Lobster (Stewart O'Nan)

Perhaps it’s my own memories of my first job as a bus boy at a seafood restaurant in southern California. Or perhaps it was my two summers managing a kitchen at a summer camp. Whatever it is, I find stories centered around restaurant jobs endlessly fascinating. Don’t let your lack of membership in that quirky “club” repel you: Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster has wider appeal in its everyman hero, Manny, dedicated to his managerial responsibilities at a Red Lobster branch even though the corporation is shutting it down. Whether it’s for pride or because nothing else is really going right in his life, he wants this one last night to be a success. Naturally, he’s the only one who seems to care: the rest of his staff are focused entirely on getting their paychecks, goofing off, and just getting out of the kitchen before the oncoming snowstorm makes it impossible to traverse the New Britain, Connecticut, streets.

O’Nan thanks many people from a real Red Lobster at the end of this book, and it’s clear that they taught him well the Ways of the Lobster. His penchant for detail about every aspect of the job is part of what makes this story so fun. What makes it heartbreaking is Manny’s emotional balancing act as he tries to find how to stay in love with his pregnant girlfriend but how to confirm that he still holds some attraction for one of his waitresses. In the end, Manny walks away from the Red Lobster with something resembling a kind of triumph, though it’s hard not to feel this is a tragedy: The only thing in front of him as he trudges through the snow on his way home is a future at the next circle in Hell, Olive Garden

This is a perfect small book that feels bigger than its thickness, which speaks to O’Nan’s talent for concentrating characters and plot. The challenge of holding your attention—I mean, it’s a friggin’ restaurant, how much could happen?—is so strong that you end up not being able to put the book down just because a busload of senior citizens is pouring through the front door.

The trouble with Dennis.

I've had the most difficult time letting go of Dennis Miller. I've always respected him for knowing the limitations of his own talent, thus he is one of the few SNL alums to consciously not make a serious attempt at the big screen. Sure, he's had his missteps, but at least he is willing to take a few chances, and no matter how hard he falls on his face, he manages to protect himself.

And he is also not afraid to admit publicly -- very publicly -- that he has changed greatly in the last few years. He says that the events of 9/11 changed how he views the world and politics. What he means when he says this is that he has become conservative. Uncomfortably conservative. So much so, in fact, that he has stated in the pre-press for his new show on CNBC that he will not make any cracks against George W. Bush. He says he likes the President and he likes the job he's doing.

While any regular readers of this blog know, the value of Bush's presidency is an issue where Dennis and I will disagree. But the idea that a good comedian's politics would somehow make a subject -- any subject -- off-limits just seemed like a really, really bad precedent. I mean, it's not a censorship issue, by any means. It's Dennis' show, so whatever-the-hell he wants to do, that's his prerogative. And it's not like he'd be the first pundit-like semi-comedy, semi-news show to have an agenda. I just didn't see the move coming from Mr. Miller. So though I was surprised and perplexed by Dennis' decision to hold his tongue on all things Bush, I still had a little respect for the guy. What can I say: It's hard for me to say goodbye for good.

So I planned on watching the first week of the new show -- even if it was going to be a "Bush-free zone." I finally tore through the shows on my TiVo recently, so here's some belated thoughts several days after the event. Hey, it's the best I can do, what with the house purchase and all.

The first moment's of the series did not make me any less dubious. You pretty much expected one of his "rants" right off the bat, and a sort of rant came out in his preface, where a chimpanzee, which is credited as a "co-host" on the show, was used as a metaphor for all the balance Dennis hopes to bring to his TV audience. He hopes he can bring some levity and truth to the table, cutting through all the b.s. that we get all the time from politics. Again, these words seem much more hollow with his promise that the current administration will not be harshed on.

The chimpanzee (which he constatly calls a "monkey" over and over throughout the first week of the series -- I hope someone has set him straight by now) is a weak gimmick, and it's hard not to watch the "interaction" between Dennis and the chimp and wonder if, by Thursday, he was re-thinking the idea the same way that David Schwimmer has famously hated "Marcel" from his TV show.

Anyway, after the opening salvo, things got all soft as he lobbed Arnold Schwarzenegger some of the biggest softballs I've ever seen, basically framing questions in this basic fashion: "A lot of people seem to be upset about the Bush administration doing _______, but isn't he completely right to do it that way?" Keeping things nice and safe and basically handing everyone their talking points. Thus enabling them to seem quite earnest when, at the close of the interview, they each pipe up with "Congratulations on the new show, Dennis!"

Dennis attempts a sort of "Weekend Update" news segment he calls "The Daily Rorshach," but on three of the first four nights, it falls incredibly flat. The fact that they've gone without a studio audience makes things a little challenging for him, but we still hear the off-camera giggling of the crew, which always reminds me of the inane Talk Soup -- not a the type of programming that I would think a channel like CNBC necessarily wants to be likened to.

And then there's a panel each night, made up of one conservative (David Horowitz in the first week), one liberal (Naomi Wolf), and one celebrity, sometimes a politician and sometimes an entertainer from Dennis' past. (Martin Short sat in on Thursday night.) This could easily be the best part of the show, where there is the possibility of some good debate from some good minds. Unfortunately, Dennis (or his director) knows nothing about keeping things in any sort of control, and on most nights, when everyone wasn't talking over everyone else, Naomi was pleading with David to please, please, please let her finish her thought without him interrupting, and David insisting to Naomi that he wasn't interrupting.

Dennis was clearly uncomfortable the first couple of nights, but he was slowly finding his bearings by Wednesday night. The show might get better over time, but not without some changes. Like a small studio audience. Or perhaps less limitations on the subject matter. Dennis is still looking for a vehicle that fits as well as his HBO show was. Sadly, this isn't it. The good news, I suppose, is that I'm not going to have to keep watching. One week was enough to know that, conservative bent or not, this show was not a good exploitation of Dennis' strengths.

It's a hard breakup for Dennis and me. Luckily, he's trying to make it as easy as possible.

Do you like your market black?

I recently finished reading Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, and I'm a little disappointed in myself because, well, I had pretty much the same reaction that everyone else I know had to it: Nice read, but it ain't no Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.

That first book was kind of transformational for me. I've been vegetarian now for three years, and I originally did it to make me eat a more healthy diet. But Fast Food Nation clarified for me some social reasons for my decision. And it isn't just a horrors-of-the-stockyard, modern-day The Jungle that one might expect; Schlosser really explores the economics of fast food, like the low-wage jobs or -- most compelling to me -- the screwed-up business of franchising restaurants. (I now try to avoid setting foot in any fast-food franchise, even for a baked potato or salad.) And he looks at the cultural effect of fast food, like the targeting of kids in marketing campaigns while completely ignoring any negative effects on their health.

Fast Food Nation, I think, was also the book primarily responsible for bringing to the world's attention the (already known but heavily underreported) fact that McDonald's french fries actually had beef byproducts added to them and they weren't as "vegetarian" as many had originally believed. For this exposé alone, the book was worth publishing. One in a series of comeuppances that Mickey D's has had to suffer through in the last few years. I'll supersize an order of that, with relish, please.

Reefer Madness did not inspire me quite the same way, though Schlosser can take the facts surrounding a non-fiction event and spin a story as well as any novelist I've read. And it's in the section that could easily have become the most titillating that he tells the most intriguing tale. The section is on pornography, and the story is that of Reuben Sturman, the indisputable former king of modern pornography, and his remarkable "run" from the law, capture, escape, recapture, and eventual demise. While Sturman was not nearly as evil as one Al Capone, his desire to not give the US government one cent of his income went way beyond obsessive and mad Capone look like a rank amateur at tax evasion.

Though he sometimes seems a little unsure, Schlosser is fairly certain that more government regulation is needed. I struggle with the idea of more regulation myself -- I want to see better things happen in our country, but I'm sufficiently cynical to doubt that grassroots movements can effect that change. I'm sure I should be even more cynical of government's ability to do this as well, but the way I look at it, as long as the current administration is going to expand government at an ever-dizzying pace, I can wish to see that expansion used for the common good rather than for the purpose of beating ploughshares into swords.

So I, who have never so much as held a joint to my lips, am in favor of legalizing marijuana, since, despite the cultural "tradition" of casting it as something evil, could not possibly be any more destructive than alcohol. And let's use the income from taxing weed to fund some kickass substance abuse programs.

Let's get some serious immigration reform -- not that pseudo-bill that Bush just pushed to us prior to his trip to Mexico. I worry for the future of California, a state near and dear to my heart, if we don't find a way to pay living wages -- and as FDR put it in 1933, "by living wages I mean more than a subsistence level -- I mean the wages of a decent living." We need to think about our relationship to those low-paying, "immigrant" jobs in a whole new way.

And let's get some backbone and toss the Comstock Law. It's a relic of the past, a joke, and it only seems to get exercised when some conservative mouthpiece way out of the mainstream decides (s)he needs some attention (s)he can't otherwise get and tries to justify a crackdown on free speech disguised as something for the good of "the family."

As for Schlosser, though my excitement about him was slightly dampened by this book, I'm betting his next book brings him back more to the center of a media maelstrom: He's writing about the American prison system.