Last Night
Brendan Lemon
In his boldly imagined debut novel, Brendan Lemon simultaneously goes island hopping—from Manhattan to Cuba—and tone hopping—from acute romantic drama to weighty philosophical musing. The book's New York segments are witty, affectionate, and finely tuned to human foibles. The Cuban scenes, particularly those which take place in the isolation of a prison cell, suffer a bit by comparison. Lemon is sharp and fleet with social observations grounded in the specific interplay of well-drawn characters in distinct settings, but his prose—perhaps inevitably—becomes thicker and more circuitous when tracking the interior suffering of a sensitive intellect in solitude. Most seasoned novelists would have trouble wedding these disparate tonalities, so its hardly surprising that Lemon stumbles a bit with the challenge he's set for himself. For the reader who is willing to tolerate a bit of loginess after a snappily paced beginning, the book is rich with nuanced observations.
Last Night is structured as a long letter from John Webster, a 33-year-old Anglo-American New Yorker, to Eduardo, his 18-year-old Cuban ex-lover. Webster writes his epistle over the course of one long dark night in the penitentiary where he's being held in a fairly complex—but well-limned—conspiracy that spins out of Eduardo's accidental killing of a Havana gay basher. The night of Webster's writing will end in his execution or his release. As a coda, a second four-page document reveals Webster's fate to the reader.
In the New York vignettes concentrated at the book's beginning, Lemon paints an altogether convincing portrait of his narrator: a kind, unexceptional man who has recently lost his partner to leukemia and has lost his banking job in the course of caring for his partner. Webster is doing part-time office work while trying to regain his emotional moorings and seeking comfort in the company of his married sister Sarah, precocious nephew Jackson, and would-be-diva gal-pal Andrea. When he meets 18-year-old Eduardo, who has accompanied his mother, a Cuban diplomat, on stateside business, Webster is smitten. Lemon effectively conveys the whirlwind rush of a new crush, while smartly delaying Webster's gradual understanding of Eduardo's underlying psychological appeal—his fresh perspectives, his zeal for life, his lack of loss—for the book's ruminative later sections.
Despite Webster's eventual mental peregrinations into the meanings of love, attraction and betrayal, the charming, deceptively simple early scenes of the 33-year-old narrator, his teenage beau, and his prepubescent nephew in awkward ly affectionate conversation have as much pith to them as anything in the book. Lemon cleverly seeds the reader's mind with questions about the blurry line between wanting to grow up and wanting to recapture lost youth.
As Webster gives in to the tug of passion and follows Eduardo to Cuba, Last Night reveals its islands to be poles in terms of social attitudes toward homosexuality. For all his exuberance in New York, Eduardo is furtive, mercurial, and dangerously recoiled on his home turf. The reader comes to see that, while Eduardo himself represents a sort of liberation for Webster, it is the freedom of NewYork that fueled the couple's Manhattan romance for the younger, more culturally repressed man.
Once Webster reaches Havana, Lemon handles the scene of the accidental killing—near a night time fiesta—quite deftly, describing the physical action of a streetfight in vivid detail. Likewise, he economically sketches roadside post offices, gas stations and the ramshackle country house where Webster and Eduardo hide out. But after the two men are arrested and Webster is dragged into the months-long grind of imprisonment and trial, the novel comes to feel dominated by abstraction:
"From this distance, I'm not sure I can describe so intense and therefore fleeting a joy, but in looking back...I have the feeling that, curiously, I hadn't noted then the very thing I had indeed noted most of all.I had seen someone with whom I was not only in love, but whom I loved...I no longer worried that my complex nexus of feeling for you was only an illusion that my mind had manufactured to gratify my ego..."
To a certain extent, musings like this one seem to reasonably reflect the free-floating thoughts of an incarcerated man. But, spread over nearly 100 pages, they put a drag on Last Night's pacing, and erode the reader's sense of tension about Webster's fate. Toward the end of the book, one regrets feeling more tangled in over-ambitious prose than pulled forward by a previously compelling story.
Through his author's acknowledgements, as well as frequent literary and cultural references in Last Night (including one delightful paragraph in which L'il Abner and Henrik Ibsen both make cameos!), Lemon makes it clear that he is a broad and curious reader. Other such readers may enjoy Last Night all the more if they read it in counterpoint to James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. Written almost 46 years ago, Baldwin's masterpiece features another American abroad, delivering his own one-night monologue about a cross-cultural romance turned tragic by crime. The most profound difference is that Baldwin's uprooted New Yorker is the character whose sexual repression leads to disaster. Nearly half a century later, Lemon reminds us how much American society has changed, and how much change is still needed elsewhere in the world.
