Review: Last Night at the Lobster

Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While I haven’t worked a restaurant job, my friends have, and I remember helping out at closing time with the reward of drinking a beer with the rest of the crew in the closed dining room afterwards. I’ll remember the casual camaraderie with people I might not have ever talked to before. It wasn’t like the work friendships of an office job, it felt more real. O’Nan captures this feeling. In this case, the restaurant is a chain restaurant, Red Lobster, and this is the story of one on its final day. The style was interesting, kind of a faux documentary following around the restaurant manager through his day, but with incredible detail of events and thoughts. It was a lot like O’Nan wrote a book to go with a documentary on that restaurant closing, following the manager around, revealing his inner thoughts through a kind of documentary-style monologue/voice-over. I could imagine this on Front Line or on HBO. I enjoyed the style. The novel is somewhat short, so that also felt like documentary-length. There was nothing extraneous. Nicely done.

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