"Last Night at the Lobster," "The Uncommon Reader"

"Last Night at the Lobster"

by Stewart O'Nan

Viking, 146 pp., $19.95

On its face, the final night of business for a threadbare chain restaurant in suburban Connecticut isn't a terribly promising setting for a novel, or even (as this is) a novella. Nonetheless, "Last Night at the Lobster" is a sharp, perceptive little gem.

Author Stewart O'Nan has a gift for versatility. He's written high-octane, crime-fueled novels ("The Speed Queen"), historical fiction that can be harrowing ("A Prayer for the Dying") or touching ("A World Away"), and brilliant nonfiction ("The Circus Fire," his account of a 1944 catastrophe). In "Last Night at the Lobster," he turns his attention to a quietly dying moment in one man's life.

It's almost Christmas, and corporate headquarters is closing a failing Red Lobster. The manager, Manny DeLeon, has reluctantly taken the company's offer of a lesser job at another restaurant. And so we follow Manny through his last bittersweet night at the Lobster, recalling the good memories and serving the few people crazy enough to be away from home as a blizzard approaches.

Manny is a stand-up guy: He loves his restaurant, wants to do right by his customers and workers, and feels a (perhaps misplaced) loyalty to the company. And so he optimistically waits, refusing to close the place even when some of his workers don't show up or call it quits midway through their shifts. (Manny abandons his post only long enough to make a snow-soaked run to the mall to find a gift for his pregnant girlfriend at home.)

As the night continues, O'Nan paints tender, succinct portraits of Manny, his employees and their intertwined histories. The writer has often been praised for his straight-arrow attention to the details of everyday working-class life, and "Last Night at the Lobster" is a terrific addition to an already impressive body of work.

Reviewed by Adam Woog

"The Uncommon Reader"

by Alan Bennett

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 120 pp., $15

"The Common Reader" was the title Virginia Woolf gave her first book of literary essays, aimed at readers like herself who had little formal education but plenty of native intelligence and curiosity.

Who, then, would "The Uncommon Reader" be?

In Alan Bennett's mischievous hands, it's an elderly lady living in a large London palace with a rambunctious herd of Welsh corgis who's unexpectedly lured by the presence of a library bookmobile parked outside her kitchen quarters one day.

Yes, the title character in the latest offering from the British playwright-diarist-novelist ("The History Boys") is Queen Elizabeth II herself. And his tale of how she gets distracted from her official duties by a sudden, late-in-life love of reading is a charmer.

Serving as Her Majesty's guide to the world of literature is young Norman, a kitchen dishwasher — skinny, ginger-haired, gay — who happens to be browsing the bookmobile at the same moment the queen wanders into it. The two soon hit it off.

"What a find Norman was," Her Majesty reflects. "She knew that she inhibited, made people shy, and few of the servants behaved like themselves. Oddity though he was, Norman was himself and seemed incapable of being anything else."

Norman is promoted upstairs, but the Queen's palace staff and prime minister aren't happy about it. Nor do they approve of a monarch who always has her nose in a book when she should be waving regally at her people. QE2's public appearances lose the verve they used to have ("She laid foundation stones with less élan") and her book chat with the commoners she meets throws her whole schedule out of whack.

Bennett manages to touch on some pointed issues in this little volume: life experience versus book experience; the pleasure of reading versus the sterility of being briefed; the riddle of what is "natural" behavior when a person lives so much in the public eye. And he makes you whoop with laughter while he's at it.

Reviewed by Michael Upchurch