Book Report: What My Last Man Did

24. Andrea Lewis, What My Last Man Did (2017) (12/9/25)

This book is by a friend of my sister-in-law, who can't speak highly enough about Lewis's writing. In January the three of us will be participating in an online workshop together, and I thought it would be instructive to read this book by way of introduction. 

Comprising ten linked stories, it begins with two sisters, narrator Hannah, 23 years old, and her older, reclusive genius sister Iris, in 1975 in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and a year later, Galveston, Texas. The action then goes back in time to 1895 New Orleans, from there hopscotching to 1901, 1917, and 1932, all still in Louisiana; 1945 Sacramento; 1948 London; and 1962 Galveston. The final chapter brings us full circle back to Las Cruces and 1976, where Hannah is still casting about for some direction, some grounding, while Iris stumbles into (we hope) happiness. In the meantime, we've met their grandparents, their parents, the beloved foreman of the family's Texas rancho, and various other key (or merely interesting) characters. 

One chapter is entirely epistolary. Most are written in the first person, as told by various individuals. Lewis has an amazing grasp of place and time, and every detail helps paint a picture. In some chapters all the detail became a bit exhausting for me, and all I could think of was the research Lewis must have done to come up with, for example, the very specific Fiat-Allis 16-B tractor or the Beech D17 Staggerwing bi-plane, built in 1945, or the Caminada Hotel on Grand Isle, Louisiana, which Lewis may have invented, but I wouldn't be surprised if it actually existed and actually was destroyed in the actual hurricane of August 12, 1901. To name but a few examples. 

Craft guides talk about the "telling detail": rather than describing every last feature of a person, say, you pick out one or two that encapsulate a character. Here's where Lewis, to my mind, sometimes goes a bit too far. For example:  

[Five-year-old] Angelica twirled six rows of pearlescent pop-beads she wore on one wrist. She had on a Superman t-shirt and a skirt with a print of yellow light bulbs and green telephones. Her fine, white-blonde hair hung limply around her shoulders. "Can you say hi?" Rick [her father] asked.
     "I have a pet tarantula," Angelica said. "Her name's Mabel."
     "Really?"
     "I have dirt in my sandals." She sat down and took off one white plastic sandal and shook it.

It's a thorough picture, to be sure, and there's nothing at all wrong with it. It just felt a little... too much. Not a complaint, really. Lewis is a masterful writer. But now I can't get the light bulbs and telephones out of my head, and it leaves me wondering what the skirt's background color was. I've settled on white.

Overall I very much enjoyed this erudite and clever book—the linkages among characters, the times and places past. I understand that Lewis is now working mostly in flash. On her website, she includes a humorous set of writing instructions titled "Flying High: Better Writing through Simple Fixes by K. Hart Undertwis" where she (deliberately) takes some of those craft guides' suggestions several steps too far. 

Now that I've managed to break myself out of the thriller/mystery genre, maybe another work of literary fiction is in order before I march back to the atomic bomb. Let's see. There must be an enticing book around here somewhere!