Sacrament and Suffering at the Red Lobster 3 comments

By Caroline Langston

During this Christmas season, perhaps more so than in any other in recent memory, the behind-the-scenes engines that power this American orgy of consumerism are more apparent to us—and more lacking—than ever.

It’s already become a hoary cliché to talk about “cutting back” and “living more simply” in this declining economy, but those platitudes generally have the benefit of being true, and serve to lay a delicate patina over the very real fears that many of us have about the future. So many of us have lost jobs, health insurance, spent down our parents’ assets to qualify them for Medicaid, and laughed out loud when the personal finance lady on morning radio talks about having three-to-six months’ living expenses just waiting in the bank for when disaster occurs.

We smirk to ourselves: disaster has already happened, seeped in via a slow and lulling trickle that’s worn us down. Apocalyptic destruction would at least be clear-cut, and a lot more compelling. For us, there’s only getting through now as honorably and thoughtfully as possible.

In a year when people are at least claiming in public that they are avoiding the mall, Stewart O’Nan’s terse, atmospheric novel Last Night at the Lobster uses the mall itself as an unlikely backdrop for a narrative of Christmas redemption. Certainly, it is the only novel I have ever read that manages to make a Red Lobster restaurant in a suburban mall parking lot as richly imagined, graceful, and human a setting as any other “postage stamp” of place in contemporary literature.

The story line of this brief work (only 146 pages from start to finish, though the prose is so lush you wouldn’t want to read it in one sitting) is simple: Manny DeLeon is the manager of a Red Lobster on the grounds of a declining mall in suburban Connecticut (think www.deadmalls.com) that Corporate has decided to close, four days before Christmas.

Manny himself has luckily been spared the layoffs, and will be transferred by the company to an assistant manager’s position at an Olive Garden in a nearby town, with no cut in pay. He has already had to face the difficult task of laying off his employees, and picking which few of them he will ask to “come along” to the Olive Garden with him, the allowance that Corporate has given him, which has caused general resentment among the employees not chosen.

The books spans the entire last day that this particular Red Lobster will be open, with Manny in charge, and it revolves around Manny’s efforts to get his crew to perform, professionally and honorably, as a team, one more time.

It opens with Manny showing up to work at the Lobster, not sure which of his staff members are actually going to show up for their shift. O’Nan’s graceful prose immediately underscores the nature of Manny’s task—both grim and wistful—in its evocation of depressing New England winter weather, the inverse of a cozy Christmas landscape:

Mall traffic on a gray winter’s day, stalled. Midmorning and the streetlights are still on, weakly. Scattered flakes drift down like ash, but for now the roads are dry. It’s the holidays—a garbage truck stopped at the light has a big wreath wired to its grille, complete with a red velvet bow. The turning lane waits for the green arrow above to blink on, and a line of salted cars takes a left into the mall entrance, splitting as they sniff for parking spots.

There’s a snowstorm in the forecast. Waiting for his day to begin, Manny parks his Buick Regal in the Lobster parking lot, and smokes a joint for courage before heading inside. It’s a vice you don’t begrudge him, as you sense the momentous nature of what his day is going to involve. If anyone deserves a hit of weed, it’s Manny. He’s an unlikely hero in contemporary fiction: Being the general manager of a Red Lobster is a genuine step up in life from his impoverished Puerto Rican immigrant origins, and it’s one reason he takes the job—and its corny corporate culture—dead seriously.

He is no saint, though, and his messy personal life underscores the very real emotional stakes for him on this last work day—saddled with a pregnant girlfriend at home whom he doesn’t love (but who he is determined to treat nobly, and rise to the occasion of fatherhood when the moment arrives), he still loves Jacquie, the Red Lobster waitress with whom he had a love affair months before, whom he hopes will somehow give him one final chance.

The remaining loyal staff members—including Jacquie—manage to arrive at work, and under Manny’s magisterial supervision, this last final day at Red Lobster begins to unfold.

I won’t narrate any further, but want to note just a few of the novel’s supreme virtues: First, its vivid and compassionate depiction of the polyglot immigrant working class—the West Indians and Dominicans and Salvadorans and Fillipinos that literally keep malls, hospitals, and nursing homes open from Maine down to Washington, DC, but which—outside books by immigrant authors themselves—are almost completely ignored in literature.

Second, it’s been a long time since I’ve read a book that hallows, in such minute and sacramental detail, the value of hard work: Manny pitches in as necessary, whether on the food line in the kitchen under Ty, his star chef, or at the bar, or even—in one unforgettable vignette—with a gas-powered snowblower in the Red Lobster parking lot, once he realizes that the snowplow service will never arrive.

And third, the novel lifts up power of love to transform the smallest of gestures, even when they seem hopeless, as when Manny sets forth in the snowstorm toward the mall to buy Deena, the pregnant girlfriend, a pair of $179 diamond earrings.

Last Night at the Lobster came out in hardback in the fall of 2007, and while it received generally positive reviews, I was surprised when the book seemed to slip like a stone from public view.

I should have known: the realities that the novel describes were only waiting for a public that, finally, was willing to suffer along with them.