cover image The Last of the Golden Girls

The Last of the Golden Girls

Susan Swan. Arcade Publishing, $19.95 (323pp) ISBN 978-1-55970-106-8

In the first part of this silly and pretentious novel, three teenage Canadian girls discover sex in 1959; the narrative then moves to 1969, in which they continue to behave like adolescents who have learned nothing about controlling their impulses. Narrator Jude Bell, scholar and athlete, is lured by her two friends Bobby and Shelley into a humiliating competition to perform a sexual act with a boy all three have a crush on. A decade later, pregnant Bobby marries wealthy Bull Cape and Shelley turns into a flower child/free-love partner of Child Cape, Bull's handsome brother and the object of Jude's misplaced devotion (and libido). Jude drones on and on about her growing power as a woman, only to obsess over the aptly named Child. These pre-AIDS hormonal travesties are played out in a lakeside community where a summer regatta matches Bull against Jonah Prince, an upstart Jewish millionaire who is having an affair with Bobby. Matriarch Lady Joyce Cape maintains a swami, for whom she has built a submersible dome, the setting for the novel's totally ridiculous apocalyptic climax. Jejune dialogue and sappy feminist philosophizing render this sex-drenched novel about as erotic as a wet paper towel, and only half as interesting. (Jan.)