The Last Thing He Told Me: A Novel

A solid read, but the devil’s REALLY in the details.
I bought this book after watching the limited series of it on Apple TV+, for two reasons: the series received surprisingly mixed reviews for a novel hot enough to incite a bidding war over it – and I wanted to see if I could diagnose, if possible, how it ended up partially derailed – and, in an admittedly odd coincidence, I’m from Austin and have lived in NYC and the Bay Area, the three main settings in each iteration. I’ll focus on that since plenty of others have covered its other elements.Given Dave’s superlative plotting and prose, and the emphasis throughout the novel placed on divining the meaning of exceptionally specific details, I was frankly taken aback by the lack of detail specific to Austin – or, rather, the lack of *accurate* detail. Her description of the University of Texas campus is accurate, as is one for an renowned 24-hour cafe. (Well, formerly 24 hours: they started closed at 10pm after their post-Covid reopening due to a lack of staff, but I assume Dave finished the novel before the pandemic.) The rest is surprisingly sloppy, and almost made me think I’d somehow purchased an early, unfinished draft. (I was startled to see a mistaken reference to Ethan in the first part of the book, set in Sausalito, for starters.)After arriving in Austin, Hannah & Bailey check into a hotel near Lady Bird Lake, one which Dave places on the south side of the Congress Avenue Bridge (its correct name) – except she subsequently refers to it as the South Congress Bridge AND the Congress Street Bridge. (This for the same bridge, keep in mind.) She correctly cites its bats – it houses the largest urban bat colony on Earth – but mentions seeing “hundreds and hundreds” of them.The bat colony has 1.5 MILLION bats, not “hundreds.” Nitpicky? Sure, but the entire *novel* is an exercise in a form of nitpicking: sorting through all the tiny clues to divine what happened to Owen, and as it turns out divining Bailey’s past while they’re at it.A few references make it sound like Dave’s never been to Austin, period. She references “the lake muted outside the car windows” near the end, the problem being that the lake in question can’t be seen from the road at all. (It’s a manmade reservoir in the Hill Country – another Dave error btw (she refers to it as “Texas Hill Country,” without the “the” – kinda the opposite of L.A. screenwriters who refers to freeways as “the 101” or “the 10,” when in Texas I-35 is just called “35.”) Hannah’s hotel has a jampacked bar at 10am on a weekday; even the SXSW festival isn’t *that* rowdy! And Downtown Austin is supposedly “lined with packed sidewalk cafes” – again, on weekdays: this wasn’t true even *before* Covid, and isn’t true today.Another road error: near the end, out near the lake, they drive onto “Ranch Road.” Dave should’ve done more homework on Texas’s admittedly unique road-naming conventions. Texas has Ranch Roads (RRs). It also has Farm-to-Market Roads (FMs) and Ranch-to-Market Roads (RMs). It does not have *a* “Ranch Road,” sans number. (Texas has over 3,500 FM / RR / RM roadways.) The only RR near an Austin-area lake is Ranch Road 620, which everyone calls 620 and absolutely no one calls “Ranch Road” (or even “Ranch Road 620” – it’s just “620”).Going briefly to New York: Hannah’s studio and shop are in SoHo. If she was a trust-fund brat who could afford $50,000-a-month retail rents, that’d be one thing, but we know she’s not. Unfortunately Laura Dave apparently doesn’t know that the SoHo art scene peaked in the ’80s and was largely gentrified out of existence 20+ years ago; the upscale galleries are in West Chelsea, but Hannah’s studio would more realistically be somewhere like Bushwick or Bed-Stuy. (Almost no galleries rely on foot traffic for any real business nowadays; it’s all online.)Switching back to the Bay Area: Dave admittedly does Sausalito justice. It’s a gorgeous and slightly bizarre area – permanent houseboats aren’t exactly commonplace in the US! – but Dave unfortunately derails a bit when the characters venture beyond it. Again, it’s the nitpicky details: instead of much-closer SFO or Oakland, Hannah & Bailey fly to Austin out of San Jose. (Even Santa Rosa would be closer than San Jose!) Almost every scene in San Francisco is set in or across from the Ferry Building, as if it’s the only thing aside from cable cars that non-locals would know about.Onto a slightly more touchy subject: the characters in the book are EXTREMELY white. And heterosexual. In San Francisco. (The series wisely fixed this bit, turning Hannah’s BFF Jules gay and Bailey’s boyfriend Asian-American, plus Grady is Latino in it.) There’s only a single person of color even referenced, but they don’t have an active role in the plot and I can’t say anything about said person without spoilers.Okay, screw it: I think I need to delve into the spoilers…******************SPOILER ALERT! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!******************When I started watching the TV series, it was obvious in the first episode that Owen left for reasons wholly separate from everything going on at work. I *literally* said to my family – jokingly, or so I thought – that the most totally cliche & ridiculous explanation would be him running from the mob.The mafia. IN TEXAS?!? I realize it’s fiction, but the drug trade in the Southwest US has been entirely under Mexican-cartel control for a VERY long time, particularly in Texas itself. And speaking of fiction, the book’s suggestion that Bailey’s mom was killed because she was clerking for a “Texas Supreme Court judge” – another error (they’re justices, not judges) – who was a far-leftist (!!) about to somehow singlehandedly issue a ruling that would ruin Big Oil (?!?), and she was murdered to “send a message.”In a book that already requires substantial suspension of disbelief, this is the single most ridiculous notion proffered. Texas is the energy capital of the world. Its state supreme court is 100% Republican – and like the U.S. Supreme Court, it has nine justices, and no single one of them can do jack by themselves – and even when it wasn’t, it never issued any rulings that negatively impacted the oil-and-gas-industry in any substantive way. The entire *point* of the so-called “Texas miracle” (its strong economy) is predicated on essentially *zero* oversight (or as close to it as possible) of the oil industry.I get that the point of this tale was to humanize Nicholas, despite Hannah already knowing he’s a monster, and to further amplify the novel’s core point about truly knowing people, but I thought it was extraneous & distracting, especially given its level of absurdity in the context of actual Texas life. (Also, Nicholas is the one who uses the term “Texas Supreme Court judges.” A real Texas lawyer, and certainly one of his level of renown, would know they’re justices.)And yet, despite all my complaining, I enjoyed the book and did a speed-read of it in under 48 hours. (Seriously!) As I’d expect from any novel optioned by Hello Sunshine, it has exceptionally strong, well-written female characters, all of whom readily pass the Bechdel test (despite the story, at least at the surface level, focusing on finding a man two women desperately miss). Even after seeing it shown on TV, I was surprised to see a reference as specific as UT’s Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL); now THAT is the level of attention to detail I appreciate, and it’s the real-life place where a former UT student would go to look up something like a yearbook.Dave even makes Hannah’s astoundingly ballsy choice at the end – cutting Owen/Ethan out of her life, for Bailey’s sake – believable, with the admittedly clever conceit of having the Big Bad be a mob lawyer, not a mafioso, and one who wanted to have a role in his granddaughter’s life despite blaming Ethan for Kate’s death. I did *not* see that coming on the series, but Jennifer Garner NAILED IT in that scene as well. (Also, the series allowed for scenes the book’s structure – wholly from Hannah’s POV – did not, e.g. Bailey meeting her extended family.)But maybe spend a few weeks in a city first before you decide to set two-thirds of your next novel there?

Mom-Daughter Relationship Overshadowed by Silly Plot
I picked this up because I was interested in the relationship between the stepmother and the daughter and how it developed, and in this sense, it was underwhelming. Dave had good writing, good editing, and good insight into the relationship – basically, being sweet doesn’t matter as much as what you do when things get hard, and you have to be willing to put the child first even above the other adult in the relationship, and you need trust. But the actual story *hindered* this character transformation. It made it necessary for the daughter to depend on the stepmother (but not in reverse), and in such an outlandishset of unique circumstances, it doesn’t have much applicability for real people, and the spectacularly silly scenario squashed a lot of the emotional nuance a story like this could have had. Worth like $5 in my opinion, but not $14.*****SPOILER ALERT****So in a nutshell: Bailey’s father had to run because he offended the mob, but they are in this unique situation where the mob won’t mind if Bailey and Hannah are living there on their own, as long as they never see Owen the father again. Hannah eventually decides to do this, rather than go into witness protection, so that Bailey can go back to doing theater and having her boyfriend, and she can have her art career, and they can “be everything that makes them themselves”.Bailey has to learn to trust and respect Hannah, whom she otherwise hated, as they seek out what happened to Owen and eventually realize they can’t get him back. But Hannah doesn’t have to learn to trust Bailey. She tells her the truth a few times, but mostly you have the impression that she is leading around an angry bull on a leash, and Bailey repeatedly makes bad choices suggesting she is not worthy of trust. Their relationship is largely characterized by Hannah blandly stepping around Bailey hating her, trying not to trigger Bailey to rebel, and wanting to be comforting but not. Until at the end, when Bailey realizes she has no choice but to accept Hannah as the only remaining adult in her life.So the message is, if you are the only adult in a teen’s life, they will have to come around.It seemed like a lost opportunity to develop a relationship based on actual, mutual trust. Or to grapple with the complexities of dealing with a difficult family situation IN a family, rather than essentially stripped of all family and totally alone. Plus, there’s a ridiculous mob backstory.

Good book with a disappointing ending
This book was interesting and kept my attention. It was well written. I was quite disappointed in how it ended, though. It left me feeling depressed rather than satisfied.

O tema é o decorrer da história.

Buenísimo el libro, te atrapa desde el principio. Me encanto como se va desenvolviendo la historia, fácil de digerir, intrigante, los personajes muy bien descritos, los imaginas a la perfección, nunca te esperas que va a seguir. No esperaba ese final, me dio tristeza pero es como debía ser. La lección del libro “we always have a choice”. Muy recomendable

One of the best books I’ve ever read!!