A Refuge of Last Resort

What hooked me first in A Refuge of Last Resort was Robb Erwin’s nerve. He opens with Lorelei hiding in a corporate restroom, dodging a job so degrading it has already hollowed out her sense of self, and from there he builds a novel that is part dystopian satire, part trauma odyssey, and part social critique. That mix should be unruly. Often, it is. But Erwin gives it enough bite and moral heat that I kept reading to see how far he would take Lorelei through the wreckage.

Lorelei is a strong narrator for this kind of book because she is both sharp and damaged. Her observations about Saino-Blatt’s RFID surveillance, private-equity food marketing, foster-care abuse, and labor exploitation are often darkly funny, but they never feel casual. They come from someone who has spent her life being managed, cornered, and repurposed by systems that call themselves normal. I liked how Erwin lets her intelligence show up in her hyper-attentive sense of smell, her wildlife background, and the way she can clock danger before anyone says its name.

Bart Sampson is another reason the novel works. What begins as a grotesque grocery-store promotional disaster turns into a moving bond between a battered young woman and an aging California hippie whose own ideals have been strip-mined by corporate America. Their conversations about food co-ops, widowhood, labor, and survival give the book some of its warmest pages. Later sections at Mermaid Cove and the overcrowded Pioneer Valley shelter widen the novel’s scope in ambitious ways, and I admired how seriously Erwin treats displaced people rather than using them as backdrop.

The thing I found about this book is that its ambition could harden into overstatement. Lorelei sometimes narrates in essayistic blocks that explain the world’s politics and moral failures so thoroughly that the story loses momentum. A few reveals and coincidences also feel engineered to prove a point rather than arise naturally from character. The novel is at its strongest when it trusts Lorelei’s lived experience instead of pressing every theme so hard.

I stillI found A Refuge of Last Resort memorable, strange, angry, and unexpectedly tender. It is a messy book on purpose and sometimes to its detriment, but it has a real voice, a real conscience, and scenes I won’t forget. Readers open to socially charged fiction with satirical teeth and a bruised human center will find a lot to admire here.