cover image The Last Cigarette

The Last Cigarette

Jason Waldrop. Mid-List Press, $14 (193pp) ISBN 978-0-922811-37-3

Set in an imaginary, Orwellian nation eight years after the prohibition of cigarettes, Waldrop's debut novel is narrated by a sullen but vain bureaucrat, Paul Weber, who is beginning to fall apart. His frustration about his inability to remember his father, who died seven years ago, reflects the pervasive obliteration of personal memory throughout the Nation, as the country is called. Memory has, in fact, become public domain, the latest example being the government's Memory Project, in which the recollections of elderly people are being elicited, tabulated and subtly altered to construct a sanitized version of the past. Weighing heavily on Paul's conscience is his possession of a forbidden object: the last cigarette, stolen years ago from its display in a museum. Walking through the park, he impulsively strips naked and sets the cigarette and his discarded clothing on fire. Through this absurd act of rebellion, he meets a beautiful stranger, Lynn Dalton, who within a day becomes his lover and to whom he confesses his crime. Not only is she not horrified, but she lets him know that there is, in fact, a flourishing black market in cigarettes. Soon enough she disappears, giving Paul reason to worry. Was she arrested? Is she an informer? Then he loses his job, and his career-rehabilitation agent discloses the disturbing truth about his father's real identity, offering Paul the opportunity to assume his father's clandestine government position. Waldrop wrestles with an ambitious, sophisticated plot in which daily objects (peach pits, baby dolls, tattoos, light bulbs) function as code between both characters and secret operations. Paul's confusion leads him to wax long-windedly on how to decipher the various surprises that disorient his life. Because the supporting characters are elusive and laconic, the reader's only anchor is Paul, whose voice is forced. The nightmarish atmosphere of the futuristic world is well sustained, but the reader must wrestle with decoding not only the complexity of the plot, but the overwrought expressions of its narrator. Agent, Susan Schulman. (July)