"The Last Laugh," by Lynn Freed

Lynn Freed’s novel “The Last Laugh” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017) is a sort of slightly dispiriting, rather self-conscious making-fun-of-the-genre romp. Three women friends in their late sixties with backgrounds in South Africa, Europe, and the United States decide to live on a Greek island together for a year. They (or at least two of them) decide they have outlived passion and men, and are also tired of the complications of their grown children’s lives; they just want to take a break from all that and enjoy the pleasures of Greece with good friends, good food, sunshine, and the other cliches about this kind of adventure. Of course real life intervenes in the form of badly-timed family visits, love affairs, a bit of jealousy, and more. I kept thinking of the most famous older (early 20th century) example of this genre, “Enchanted April” (about which I posted on 12/20/14), and how lovely it was, although (because?) it was set in an earlier time. At one point, one of the characters in Freed’s novel alludes to “Enchanted April” as unrealistic. Perhaps “The Last Laugh” is more realistic, but it is also clumsier and more self-consciously whimsical. It is a quick, fun read but rather forgettable.