LAST HOUSE: or, The Age of Oil, by Jessica Shattuck
Jessica Shattuck’s new novel, “Last House,” opens with a two-page list echoing the book’s subtitle, “The Age of Oil” — a cheeky ode to the ubiquity of petroleum-based products that suggests a sort of 21st-century answer to Upton Sinclair’s fast-paced satirical novel “Oil!” Instead, we get a richly detailed, slow-burning family saga distinguished by incisive psychological insight and masterful research. “Last House” brings to life several generations of the Taylor family, who, in different ways, are all involved in the social and political tumult of the second half of the 20th century.
In the prologue, we meet Nick Taylor, an earnest, fresh-faced 30-year-old junior lawyer for American Oil, on a plane over Iran’s Abadan oil field. He gazes out the window, marveling at this “vast and complex apparatus for harvesting the lifeblood of modernity,” while his colleagues heedlessly kibitz and swill booze around him.
One of these men is a former Yale classmate, the golden boy Carter Weston, “a fourth-generation prep-school type” who is dissolute and cocky, and therefore, we expect, will become the instrument of Nick’s eventual downfall. I licked my chops and settled in for a takedown of the oil industry’s evils, looking forward to watching Nick’s ideals crumble, his soul corroding in the acid of his own venal complicity.
The novel opens in the spring of 1953 in Mapleton, Conn., where Nick and his wife, Bet, a well-educated, upwardly mobile young couple, have relinquished their intellectual and artistic ambitions to live in this suburban bedroom community and raise a son and a daughter as they reap the bounty of postwar American largesse, a situation rife with dark undercurrents of marital and existential despair.
But instead of delivering on its foreshadowings, the narrative proffers and then whisks away one juicy dramatic possibility after another, letting every potential chance for interesting conflict gently deflate into internal reflection. Nick’s job troubles him far less than the novel’s beginning suggests it will, and Bet’s forfeiture of her desire to get a Ph.D. in literature to be a mother and housewife troubles her even less. The “javelin of resentment” her husband feels from her on Page 2 never reaches its target or shows its point again.
Because Nick and Bet largely seem to be essentially, mutually contented with the underpinnings of their lives, nothing is ever really at stake for them. Their children flourish, more or less. Nick’s job gives them the means to buy a Vermont vacation home, the titular “last house.” Their marriage is a steady ship plowing straight through Carter’s decades-long attempt to seduce Bet; she’s aware of it and mildly intrigued, but never truly torn or tempted. Any tension that arises between or within the Taylors somehow seems to dissipate by morning.
Fast-forward to Part 2, to the Taylor children’s coming-of-age as baby boomers circa 1968, when political turmoil and social explosion are in full swing. But the muted, genteel tone of the novel’s opening section continues into this exciting new American era, via the first-person voice of Katherine Taylor, Nick and Bet’s daughter, now in her early 20s. As with the beginning of the novel, her narrative is ripe for drama: She writes for a countercultural newspaper and hangs out with radicals in New York as her younger brother, Harry, becomes increasingly caught up in ecological activism.
But Katherine, instead of plunging into the passionate heat of her time, works hard and views her comrades from a distance, with a tinge of condescension. Much as she’d like to join in the rebellious fun, at least in theory, her proper Connecticut upbringing — her parents’ “sense of How to Be” — is too ingrained to allow her to “hoot and holler down the hillside, shirtless, T-shirt tucked into your back pocket, or to slink across the stream braless, hips swishing seductively. I was irritated with all of them.” Along with the novel, she watches primly from the bank.
All the real drama in “Last House” seems to happen offstage. A violent event, the culmination of Harry’s ecological despair, should be the novel’s dark tragic center; instead, it remains frustratingly murky, as does its aftermath. The book’s aura of well-behaved detachment is especially disappointing because Shattuck is such a good writer, giving us swaths of cultural and historical background as gracefully and intelligently as she parses the emotional depths of her characters. Every note in the novel rings clear and true, but it never comes fully to life in the way that matters.
Maybe the “comfort and ease” of the Taylors’ marriage, Bet thinks early on, “diminished a certain excitement and offered honesty in its place.” The same might be said of this admirable, ambitious novel.
LAST HOUSE: Or, The Age of Oil | By Jessica Shattuck | William Morrow | 336 pp. | $28
