Sagesse LaBasse's life seems pretty sweet, on the face of it: her parents and grandparents own and run a hotel on the Mediterranean coast of France and she spends a lot of time just hanging out by the pool with her friends. But she's a teenager (about fifteen when the book starts) so a certain amount of surly teenage dissatisfaction is pretty much de rigueur, n'est-ce pas?
To be fair, Sagesse does have some actual stuff to worry about as well: her younger brother Etienne suffered some severe brain injuries after being deprived of oxygen at birth and survives at home only with the provision of round-the-clock care from family and a series of nurses. Sagesse is also something of an outlier among her peers in terms of her background: her mother Carol is American and her father's family were pied-noirs (or possibly pieds-noir or maybe even pieds-noirs), French people of European descent who lived in Algeria when it was a French colony and who almost all relocated to mainland France after Algeria's independence in 1962. In late-1980s/early-1990s liberal France reminders of France's colonial past are a bit unwelcome, and people who were involved tend to get the side-eye as potential closet racists.
Things start to deteriorate when Sagesse's grandfather, finally exasperated beyond reason by Sagesse's friends' noisy late-night cavorting in the hotel pool, fires a gun from the upstairs balcony and injures (fortunately not seriously) a couple of them. Sagesse herself, as it happens, isn't among them as she is down on the beach a short distance away being inexpertly fingered by her teenage boyfriend Thibaud. The parents aren't prepared to take "not severely injured" for an answer, though, and proceed with the enthusiastic pressing of charges against Sagesse's grandfather. This causes some tension with Sagesse's best mate Marie-Jo, one of the key witnesses, and they drift apart.
At her mother's suggestion, Sagesse visits her American cousins in New England as an escape from all the awkward legal business, and again finds herself an outsider, this time for her half-Frenchness rather than her half-Americanness. Some things are common to the teenage experience the world over, though, and after falling out with her cousin Becky over a boy, and drinking too much at a beach party and being fountainously sick, Sagesse makes her way back to France.
Grandfather ends up getting a seven-month prison sentence, during the course of which Sagesse's father takes a more active role in running the hotel's affairs. It also becomes clear to Sagesse that Dad is running certain, hem hem, "affairs" of his own a little closer to home after she and some school friends arrive home unexpectedly. Grandfather's release, on the face of it cause for family celebration, has the opposite effect on her father as he is gradually ground down by Grandfather's insistence on being involved in the day-to-day running of the hotel. While it's almost certainly not the only factor - he appears to have what would today be described as some sort of bipolar disorder - this may have contributed to father's eventual decision to drive out along the coast to a favourite beauty spot, sit in the car overlooking the ocean and shoot himself in the head.
The disintegration of her family almost complete, Sagesse heads off to boarding school in America. On her return at the end of the year she finds her mother shacked up with a new man and contemplating shuffling Etienne off to some permanent care facility so that she can enjoy a bit of middle-aged freedom before it's too late. Grandfather, perhaps fuelled by outrage at this development, has a massive stroke and requires a permanent care facility of his own. Sagesse is a bit outraged on Etienne's behalf as well, though needless to say not enough to volunteer to jack in her studies and come home to look after him herself.
And so we end, via a quick framing device featuring Sagesse, a few years later, pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University and seemingly content with a fairly solitary existence, the odd fleeting lover aside.
Well, so far so standard coming-of-age novel, you might say: teenage protagonist, parents and grandparents of various degrees of eccentric grotesqueness and shouty oppressiveness, funny feelings and furtive sticky fumblings, you know, down there, occasional envious encounters with contemporaries of impossible beauty, fabulous riches or devil-may-care freedom, contemplation of all of the above from the remove of a few years hence, full adult sophistication having been gained in the intervening time. There's something in that, but at the same time there's plenty here to lift The Last Life above the formulaic, in particular the complications of the family's Algerian background, and some kicking around of ideas about how we perpetually re-invent ourselves, even to the extent of re-inventing our own pasts to better fit the stories we want to tell in the present.
The Last Life was Claire Messud's second novel, published in 1999; it was her third novel The Emperor's Children in 2006 that gave her her big breakthrough sales- and awards-wise. There's a touch of the "write about what you know" here, as Messud's own father was a pied-noir - these days Messud is half of a major literary power couple with her husband, critic James Wood.
Anyway, The Last Life is very well-written and enjoyable without doing anything especially startling. The previous book in this series to feature Algerian independence as a major plot point was the rather faster-moving The Day Of The Jackal.
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