Paddock’s Pick: Every Last One

Editor’s note:  Anita Paddock’s review of books we should read are scheduled to appear on the second and fourth Friday of each month. Enjoy.

review by Anita Paddock
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This novel will make you gasp, “Oh my Lord,” because you will not expect what happens to happen. That’s my warning to you. It’s also an appeal to stay with this book from the beginning and don’t look to the end to see what is going to happen.

With that caveat, here’s a brief summary of the main characters. Mary Beth and Glen Latham are parents of three teens: Ruby, the oldest; and Max and Alex, fraternal twin boys. They are an upper-class family in a New England town. The father is a doctor with a thriving practice. The mother owns a business, Latham’s landscaping, and there is plenty of money for the children to be raised with every advantage. Their house is a gathering place, filled with good food, laughter, and always room for one more for supper. The Lathams are fine people who look after their children. They believe in the butterfly effect, how the beatings of butterfly wings in Mexico can cause a breeze in their backyard. That a breast-fed baby becomes a confident adult, that a toddler who’s read to at bedtime goes on to Harvard.

The mom is like most moms of teens. Laundry is her life, and meals, and school meetings and games and recitals. The daughter, Ruby is an excellent student, creative, and prefers clothes from thrift stores. She had a small eating disorder, but therapy fixed her right up. Alex and Max sleep in a ransacked room with a line drawn down the middle. Alex is athletic and popular. Max is, well, weird. They don’t really like each other very much. The mom worries about the weird son. It seems his only friend is Kiernan, a playmate since childhood whose family once lived next door. Kiernan and Ruby used to be sweethearts, but Ruby finds him suffocating now. He follows her and takes pictures of her. She’s asked him to stop, but he won’t. He sneaks into her room and leaves the photos he’s taken lying on her pillow.

Kiernan is clearly a love struck teen. His parents are divorced, and his mother has never recovered from the drowning of a younger child. He asks Mary Beth if he can live with them for his senior year while his mother moves to another town. She’s tempted to take him in because of Max, but she knows his mother would never allow it because of issues between the moms.

The author, Anna Quinlen, who once wrote columns and won the Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times is a gifted writer. As a reader, I asked myself where she was going with these chapters of cozy everyday life in which there is lots of teenage angst, with the mother worrying more than the father, and holiday dinners with friends and family gathered round the dining room table.

New Year’s Eve arrives; the Lathams attend a party and drink too much. Ruby goes out with her friends. Max stays home with his expensive drum set he got for Christmas, and Alex is away on a sky trip with a friend.

By the time New Year’s Day dawns, tragedy has visited the Lathams and life is never the same again. The author set us up: The Latham family had it all. But in an instant, it’s all taken away.

The last half of the book deals with loss and how those left behind must deal with it. As someone who knows about sudden and tragic loss, I found the author right on with all that I had experienced. Here is a quote from Mary Beth that I found especially profound: “I found myself repeating aloud the words, ‘No more. No more.’ It was not so much that I wanted to die; it was just that I could not bear the incessant feeling of being alive. And then it occurred to me that I was already dead, that what was left behind was a carapace, like the shells of cicadas. I had been full, of creating children, of taking care of tasks and plans and a big bright future, and now all that was left was a translucent skin of what had once been my life.”

I wholeheartedly recommend this book. It’s no doubt a woman’s book, but men could certainly learn a thing or two about women and motherhood. I promise you, you will cry. The writing is superb and the story compelling. And you’ll learn something that all of us find out if we live long enough, and that is all any of us can do is to try.

•••

Since the main character in “Every Last One” owned a landscaping company, and planting trees and shrubs and flowers gave her great joy, I decided to talk to my favorite landscaper, Rick Bray.

This 30-year-old bachelor keeps the lawns and flower beds of all our public libraries looking lovely. It’s apparent he takes great pride in his work.

Rick’s mom is a 4th-grade teacher at Cavanaugh Elementary. She saw to it that Rick read lots of books when he was a little boy. Dr. Seuss books were his favorites. As an adult, he confesses that his reading has slacked off quite a bit. He did like “The Hobbit” and George Orwell’s “1984.”