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Rick Mofina has a way with plot. In his latest thriller, HER LAST GOODBYE, Greg Griffin, Buffalo-area construction contractor, comes home from a night out at the pub with the guys from work to find that his wife, Jenn, has not returned from her book club, just three miles away across their sleepy suburb. Their kid, Jake, is sleeping over at another boy's house.
Hopping into his Ford truck, Greg searches for Jenn in a wasteland of corporate big-box stores that Mofina seems to think represents the sum total of suburban American culture, or maybe just the culture of Upstate. When Greg doesn't find Jenn, he reluctantly involves first a few neighbors and then law enforcement. Problem is, he's got his own secrets--and the reader doesn't know what they are, at least not for the first few chapters. Are they the symptoms of run-of-the-mill suburban malaise, or something worse?
Greg and Jenn didn't have the perfect marriage, house, or economic situation. They dated in high school and married without experiencing the world. He is tempted by situations that crop up at work. She is glimpsed in the company of the local Lothario, who is on the school board. Her messily divorced sister-in-law didn't like her, because she, Jenn, was too put together, maybe too perfect. Also, Greg and Jenn's individual pasts weren't pleasant. Will her disappearance reveal their problems or bring them back together?
Mofina tells the story in short sentences of prose and concise, snappy dialogue. It's certainly riveting. It's also all plot. Jake is a suburban child straight from Central Casting, all stereotypical wholesome activities, video game playing without any exploration of the interior of that culture, and worries about parental divorce. Jenn, we are repeatedly told, was the perfect wife, getting her only kicks from volunteering and what sounds like an exceptionally moribund book club. What kind of books do they read? How did they meet? Was she always a reader? We never find out. It doesn't matter.
The novel is narrated in indirect address by an omniscient third person, though this perspective shifts between the points of view of different characters. Eventually, it reveals something of what has happened to Jenn, which is a letdown because it's a crime fiction cliche. At the end, when the suspense mystery is cleared up and light is also shed on the dynamics of Greg and Jenn's marriage, the surviving characters learn, rather didactically, that a marriage and a life that isn't great can still be pretty good. There are eighteenth-century conduct novels that make that point more engagingly than HER LAST GOODBYE, but it's a page-turner; a mild diversion. And if life need not be truly exhilarating, fulfilling, or memorable, should we really expect fiction to do better?
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and co-edits Reviewing the Evidence.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, December 2002
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