Kelly Braffet’s Last Exit (2006)

Something that never ceases to amaze me from TV shows like cold case files and forensic files it’s how so often, for incredibly long periods of time, horrific crimes go unsolved. Most people are familiar with the Black Dahlia case, perhaps the most famous unsolved murder of all. Modernism took a long time to catch up with fiction, until about twenty or thirty years ago, in the literary genres of mystery and thriller cases like that of the Dahlia never appeared. Even in crime fiction that functions as serious literature, like Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer novels, all loose ends are tied up, all dots and t’s crossed at the end of the book. We seek closure and resolution, and tend to get frustrated if we don’t get it. In last seen dating Kelly Braffet offers us a tale of murders and disappearances that leaves us hanging like an unsolved file. In an interview with Scott Snyder around the time this novel came out, Braffet discussed her view of secrets and the ultimate impossibility of understanding another person’s motives and behavior.

He also flavors his novel with a rather original blend of cutting-edge philosophy and observance of contemporary young adult culture, of questionable areas of foreign policy and parent-child relations, and of the magnetic appeal that the possibility of danger and harm seems to have for some people. She is as comfortable with Nietzsche and Heidegger as she is with video games and lipstick.

Speaking of Nietzsche, one of the main philosophical concepts that scholars and researchers have always associated with him is that of Nihilism- a word that seems to have different meanings depending on the thinker we are using it with in context. Nietzsche was a metaphysical nihilist who believed that, at bottom, in the final analysis, life was completely meaningless and that, in our attempts to understand it, we were simply throwing psychological projections onto the blank canvas of the universe. The scientist presents science as the Ultimate Truth, the artist presents art as the Ultimate Truth, the religious person presents religion as the Ultimate Truth: all these are simply defense mechanisms that human beings invent to try to defeat nihilism. last seen dating we examine this point sharply, in a passage where we meet a character named Seth, a beach bum and philosophize:

In Seth’s real life, the non-summer part that had nothing to do with waiting tables or dusting the sheets so he could climb into bed with her, he was a grad student reading thick books with small print and no characters. He taught eighteen year olds about Heidegger and Nietzsche. He ate sushi, went skiing in Vermont, and was writing a dissertation on Being and Time.He didn’t think any of the girls he knew in that life had dragons tattooed around their belly buttons.

The “she” having these thoughts is Miranda Cassidy, one of the two main characters in the book (the other being her mother, Anne); The point is that a true Nietzschean-perhaps Seth is, since he seems to truly relish all experiences-would not compartmentalize his life into this life and that life, real life and beach life, work life and beach life. game etc . – your life is simply an integrated thing, not something you can cut into sections like a piece of fruit. Thus, Miranda is a representative of a different type of nihilism, what is often called Russian nihilism, a belief system in which the young despise the beliefs, values, and attitudes of their elders. This is pointed out in a second, later passage about Miranda and some of her friends:

“They think of themselves as creatures of the world, tough and brutal and unbreakable. They listen to dark and angry music, they watch dark and angry movies, they collect dark and angry comics. They read Neal Stephenson and William Gibson and William S. Burroughs and Philip K. Dick and Mervyn Peake The modern world, to them, is nothing more than a pale imitation of the dystopian universes they read about…

So they wait. Meanwhile, they jealously guard their disappointment and their traps, because for them, you either understand it or you don’t understand it, and if you don’t, you better not. Their disappointment is the only thing they are sure of, and they don’t want it to be used lightly.”

You might wonder, what are these kids so disappointed in? The answer is the same as the answer to quite a few key questions the book asks: we don’t know. In a way, Braffet follows the kind of strategy used by Paul Auster in the novel glass city – a crime story, a mystery, which is unresolved and unresolved, all questions and no answers. In another way, however, it opens up an equally mysterious avenue of plot and character that depends, for its effect, precisely on our knowledge of the mystery: the CIA’s covert operations in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. While reading the novel of Braffet, I felt somewhat lucky to have been familiar with a major American novel about the CIA in Latin America of the 1980s, Robert Stone’s novel. a flag for the dawn, as well as Tina Rosenberg’s 1991 nonfiction short story Children of Cain: violence and the violent in Latin America, which helped me appreciate Braffet’s work much more. Braffet is excellent at just skimming the horrors that lie below the mouth of the volcano. This methodology is attractive to us as readers because we know that the author knows much more than she is letting on, that her knowledge of such things is strong enough to allow her to write about them in a minimalist way with confidence and plausibility.

Anne Cassidy is a middle-aged mother living in Arizona who moved there from the Pittsburgh area years ago when her husband Nick, a pilot employed by a shadowy and enigmatic company called Western Mountain, crashes their plane while flying on a Mission over Central America. and she was never heard from again. (Significantly, no wreckage of the aircraft is ever found.) Her rebellious daughter of hers, Miranda, originally accompanies her west, but she returns to Pennsylvania as soon as she is old enough to live on her own. There, she disappears one night after crashing her car, being picked up on the highway by a passerby named George who takes an unusual interest in her. She takes a walk with him and ends up somehow in a seaside town in Virginia.

Meanwhile, Anne, after not speaking to her daughter for many months, begins to go into a frenzy when her many calls to Miranda are not returned. The feeling of fear and threat is heightened several notches by the unintentionally mocking greeting on Miranda’s answering machine: “You know what to do.” Here, this rather common greeting goes from being a simple everyday phrase to a reminder of Anne’s helplessness: she it’s not know what to do. After a few days of frantic calls, Miranda’s phone number goes out of service and Anne gets on a plane to go find her. She finds only dead ends, and a detective named Romansky (a holdover from the detective stories of yesteryear, a powerless Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe; say Romansky’s name very slowly to yourself) tells her that her daughter probably just has moved, there is no foul play involved. Anne won’t have it, and when she’s granted access to Miranda’s vacated apartment and she figures out how to listen to her phone messages, she finds a series of messages from a boyfriend named Jay who grow increasingly drunken and nasty. Naturally, she fears the worst.

However, us I know that Miranda is, at least in appearance and for now, fine; after some time, Braffet begins to tell the story in sequences that alternate between Anne’s search for Miranda, Miranda’s Virginia beach slums with her slacker friends, and flashbacks showing Anne, Nick, and Miranda as a family in earlier and happier times. But just as there is a high element of angst to Anne’s search for Miranda, there is also one surrounding Miranda and the town of Lawrence Beach: a serial killer has been murdering young ladies in town, their bodies washing up on the coast, and there are constant suggestions that George could be the killer. Still later, we see that George has possible connections to Miranda’s long-lost father.

Miranda and Anne are shown to often disagree, argue, misunderstand each other, frustrate each other, behave differently, and take different perspectives on Nick’s death/disappearance. Braffet points this out in two strikingly contrasting passages that symbolize the differences in the “soul content” of mother and daughter. First, about Miranda:

“When she was driving, she liked to think she was connected to some huge, powerful machine. Like science fiction: the car’s nervous system was linked to hers through the sole of her right foot.”

About Anne (who, by the way, works at a New Age store and is interested in all kinds of New Age spirituality and healing):

“She imagines herself in Sedona, barefoot on red soil, mysterious energy humming through the soles of her feet and swirling inside her, filling her with something pure and real.”

They both channel energy through their feet, making them similar, but one through the car’s accelerator, the other through the dirt, making them different, impossibly different. Your attempts to establish genuine emotional contact are perhaps doomed to failure.

This novel has some intensely interesting supporting characters, mainly among them a fellow pilot of Nick’s named X-ray and a juggler boyfriend of Miranda’s named Rainier, and it also makes very sophisticated use of scenes that aren’t really related to the main action but suggest, comment and stand next to him. To take just one example, one morning Anne finds a man dead in her car in the parking lot of the store where she works. She had been a customer the day before, buying a book titled Heal yourself with Chakras. The whole situation is by turns absurd, ironic, sad, funny in a very dark sense of humor, meditative and sensually captivating (Braffet’s writing is very auditory oriented, with soundtracks), but it works in another way: gives us the closing we yearn for, but it does so entirely incidentally and is therefore not satisfying at all. It takes some courage to write this way, and Braffet is up to the challenge.

In this novel, mood and atmosphere, in my opinion, take precedence over the desire to write a “well done story” in the Aristotelian sense, and it’s a refreshing approach that probably more authors should try. But that’s not to say it doesn’t succeed with traditional storytelling elements like characterization, because it does. And I think a mix of modern and traditional, done well like this, is always welcome.