The Last Hope of Girls – Susie Boyt

Martha Brazil (rhymes with frazzle) has a lot on her plate – her brother’s a manipulative (is there any other kind?) drug user, her mother takes in any and every stray in need of nurturing, and her writer father is supercilious, superior and remote. As a child Martha and Matt were shuttled between their parents’ very different homes – the ramshackle, crowded-with-strangers home of their mother and the immaculate, aloof apartment of their father. When Anthony Brazil recommends her to a friend, Martha is able to leave the share flat where her every move and motivation was analysed, to caretake an apartment building in the process of being renovated. With no tenants, her job includes accommodation and primarily consists of cleaning and letting in tradesmen. When Mr Quinn, the owner, leaves a copy of Anthony Brazil’s latest literary work, Martha finds herself compelled to read it, after a life time of avoiding his critically acclaimed work, and finds everything in her life shifting.
Apparently. I was clearly reading a different book than the one all the raving reviewers read. For a start, the great revelation/s that “offer[ed] Martha a view of her world, and of her wayward family, that she [could] only ignore at her peril” wholly passed me by. Perhaps, like Anthony Brazil’s own work, it was just too subtle and complex for me, though (unlike a journalist interviewing him) I didn’t feel “stupid, vulgar, garish and brash,” just dissatisfied.
Certainly it contained a great description of Literary writing – when I read “the basic premise that life was worthless…the universe it painted was so horrible, the days lived out so bleak and useless…” I immediately thought of Praise.
Spoiler warning:
The Last Hope of Girls isn’t unremittingly bleak, but it is certainly bleak-heavy: the apartment owner is mired in misery and cries himself to sleep lying on the floor of one of the abandoned apartments; Matt might be in rehab but there’s a long and winding road ahead; her father has remarried, to a woman as obsessed about her art (she’s a musician) as he is, to the extent that their newborn is only an obstacle to her artistic fulfilment; and Martha, though she has the promise of a new and healthy romantic relationship, doesn’t come out the other end filled with hope and happiness. Eh. - Alex