Bet Taylor is a new arrival to the white-picket streets of Mapleton, Conn., when local leaders decide to tear down the suburb’s oldest house — once a hideout for ammunition during the American Revolution — to make way for a drive-in movie theater. While other young mothers bring their children to witness the spectacle (this is 1953; the fathers are at work), Bet leaves hers behind. To her, there’s something obscene in the demolition of this landmark, all for the sake of a frivolous amenity. As an excavator crashes through the windows, Bet observes uneasily that the house is “entirely breakable, no sturdier than a bird’s nest.”
This moment, which occurs early in Jessica Shattuck’s “Last House,” initially seems merely poignant. But by the end of a novel intimately concerned with the power of homes to shape and reflect the moral choices of their occupants, the house’s fate accrues a more painful meaning.
Bet’s cushioned life is bankrolled by her husband Nick’s work as a lawyer for American Oil, a fossil-fuel company collaborating with the government to wreak political and environmental havoc on oil-rich countries overseas. Following the Taylors over several generations, the novel argues that the family’s fortunes depend on the behavior that Bet deplores in Mapleton: inflicting destruction on others in the name of progress and comfort for yourself.
The author of three previous novels, Shattuck tells the Taylors’ story through homes they inhabit. Nick grows up in a Wisconsin homestead without electricity or indoor plumbing, an experience that drives him to pursue a lucrative legal career. His work has catastrophic effects — in 1953, he helps the CIA foment a coup to depose Iran’s elected president in favor of a monarch friendly to foreign oil companies — but it allows him to install Bet and their two children, Katherine and Harry, in an elegant suburban colonial. A decade later, Katherine leaves home for a fashionably squalid loft in Manhattan, where she covers the student movements of the late 1960s as a journalist.
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Shattuck depicts all of these residences with nostalgia for the versions of the American Dream they represent: bootstrapping frontier life, mid-century prosperity, freewheeling social activism. None is more lovingly evoked than the Last House of the title, a summer home the Taylors build in a Vermont valley where several of Nick’s intelligence-world colleagues also own property. The epitome of what might be called “quiet luxury” on TikTok, Last House boasts weather-beaten clapboards, tartan couches, a lawn of wildflowers — and a basem*nt full of canned goods and emergency supplies, because Nick intends the remote compound to serve as a refuge if the United States ever experiences the sort of civil unrest he helped incite in Iran.
As the disastrous effects of CIA meddling become evident and a nascent environmental movement points fingers at fossil-fuel companies, the Taylors reevaluate the places where they’ve lived, which come to embody not only their entanglement with the industry but the personal consequences of their flawed choices. Nick’s childhood home, ruled by a domineering father, instilled in him a credulous respect for authority and molded him into a willing pawn of his employer. Maintaining the Mapleton colonial forces Bet, who worked as a codebreaker during World War II, into the stifling role of industry wife. As a college student, Katherine dives into communal living to distinguish herself from her parents, but finds that her activist roommates are fellow children of privilege primarily interested in expiating their own guilt — and not very useful to the movements they espouse. Even Last House proves a fleeting refuge when an act of ecoterrorism goes awry, the Taylors’ complicity in fossil-fuel extraction returning to their literal doorstep.
If this arc sounds a little neat, it is. Shattuck tends to sacrifice complexity for narrative symmetry, especially when the piously right-minded Katherine takes over the narrative from her more interestingly flawed parents. Still, by invoking America’s most cherished domestic archetypes, the author extends the novel’s criticism beyond its protagonists. The Taylors are culpable in oil’s brutal geopolitics, but they’re certainly not the only Americans to benefit from fossil fuels or make dubious decisions in pursuit of a certain kind of idealized home. Presenting the family’s motivations as ubiquitous and often sympathetic, “Last House” asks readers to consider how their own personal striving might require unjustifiable involvement in corrupt systems.
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“Last House” joins a small cadre of novels, such as Lydia Kiesling’s “Mobility,” that show how the fossil-fuel industry warps even the lives it most privileges. Unfortunately, Shattuck’s novel retreats somewhat from its own conclusions as it draws to an end. Last House does come to provide an ultimate refuge for the family during a natural disaster, and in the final pages, Katherine’s daughter imagines painting the house at night. Its windows, lit cozily by a solar-powered generator, would show “the shape of man’s assertion over nature, lovely but ephemeral.”
That vision of escalating climate catastrophe is delivered in poetic prose. It’s almost possible to forget that it can be written only from the safety of Last House.
Irene Katz Connelly is a writer and book critic from New Jersey.
Last House
By Jessica Shattuck
William Morrow. 325 pp. $28.
