Stewart O’Nan excels at bringing the reader into the skin of his characters. His realities are stark, though his stories are less violent and follow more mainstream kinds of characters now than in his earlier works. In lesser hands, “Last Night at the Lobster,” which shadows a manager through his restaurant’s closing day, would be mundane; instead, this bittersweet story sings.
Manny DeLeon’s Red Lobster is set in the corner of the parking lot that surrounds a run-down Connecticut shopping mall. He has worked his way up to general manager and feels like the place is his own.
He is here today, though, for the restaurant’s final day. O’Nan watches Manny opening the restaurant: “While Red Lobster doesn’t license franchises, over the years he’s come to consider this one his – or did until he received the letter from headquarters. He’d expected they’d be closed for renovations like the one in Newington, the dark lacquered booths and mock shoreline décor replaced by open floor space and soft aqua pastels, the Coastal Home look promised on the company website. … Instead, headquarters regretted to inform him, a company study had determined that the New Britain location wasn’t meeting expectations and, effective December 20th, would be closing permanently.”
Speaking by telephone, O’Nan said he began thinking about the story after reading about a Red Lobster that closed overnight.
“The customers had come to have their Sunday lunch after church and found the front door chained,” he said. “That was kind of strange, it stuck with me. This idea of this restaurant that obviously had its regulars, and knowing that the Red Lobster was a chain, I thought about the off-kilter relationship between corporate ownership vs. local constituents.” And because Red Lobster doesn’t sell franchises, he said, the manager is working for the corporation, like any other employee, “even though his stake, I think, is a stake emotionally that much greater.”
Manny’s emotional tie to the restaurant is clear, and the stakes are heightened by the encroaching Christmas holiday and an approaching blizzard. He won’t be out of a job; on Monday he’ll start working the lunch shift at a nearby Olive Garden. But he has been allowed to take only five employees with him. The result is that, of the 44 people who used to work at the Lobster, a bare skeleton crew remains to see this final evening through.
The book is sectioned to reflect the rhythm of Manny’s day. “We open, we have lunch service, then there’s a break. And then we do dinner service, and then we close up,” O’Nan said. “In that sense I wanted to be taking the form of his day. Because it is one of those day-in-the-life books. This happens to be the worst day in his life.”
The day reveals friendships, regrets and a love affair that Manny wishes were not a thing of the past. He comes in on this last day looking for some answers, perhaps for some closure, but it’s an elusive goal. O’Nan said, “I think he has to accept what’s happened. In that sense, that might be an answer, and an end to this part of his life. I would hope that the reader can see that the answer is there, even if Manny doesn’t quite confess to feeling it.”
O’Nan said that Manny loses everything except himself – “He is true to himself all the way to the very end,” the author said.
If O’Nan’s works of fiction are linked, it is not by recurring story line but by his ability to bring readers into the world of his characters. He does it, he said, by trying to stay close, to stay intimate with the character.
“How does it feel to be you? That’s always the big question on my mind when I look at a certain character, how does it feel to go through this experience? You want to share that with the reader. That seems to me the real privilege of a novelist, letting people see a part of life that you, the novelist, think they should see,” he said.
The rich world of the blogs written by current and former Red Lobster employees was but one of several sources of insight for the novel. O’Nan said he also visited the restaurant, “stealing menus and taking pictures,” and interviewed people who’d worked at the Red Lobster in Torrington that had been shut down.
And, he said, he called on his own experience as a teenager working in restaurant kitchens. “A lot of this (novel) is interaction between the sitters and servers and back of the house, the kitchen. It definitely comes from my experience, that overall feeling of ‘Here’s a squabbling family that every night somehow gets it done.’ And the sad thing is that that’s going to be all gone.”
O’Nan has just finished a new novel, “About a Girl.” He will be at the Tattered Cover Book Store, 2526 E. Colfax Ave., Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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FICTION
Last Night at the Lobster
by Stewart O’Nan, $19.95
