The Last Ferry Out Will Likely Satisfy NA Readers

 

 

 

 

The Last Ferry Out (May 2025)

By Andrea Bartz

Random House Publishing–Ballantine Books, 320 pages

★★★

 

Mysteries and thrillers frequently parallel Alfred Hitchcock movies in that most have details that defy logic and probability. As Hitchcock observed, if you do the details well, your audience won’t notice. The new Andrea Bartz novel The Last Ferry Out works well as a heart-thumping thriller, but is marred by too much foreshadowing and forced resolution. It partially redeems itself by exposing the flaws of internalized colonial thinking.

 

Bartz’s protagonists are Abby and Eszter, a couple who met at the University of Wisconsin and, at age 27, became engaged. They are besotted with each other, though they are an odd couple. Abby grew up with an indecisive alcoholic mother, couldn’t wait to be out on her own, has minimal contact with her mother, and is an extrovert who goes hard (sometimes too fast) at things she wants. Estzer is a child of a successful Hungarian/Jewish immigrant family, but is introverted, analytical, and deliberate. Her parents don’t outwardly condemn her choices, but give little outward sign of agreeing with them or of embracing Abby. This enrages Abby, who reminds her beloved that she is an adult who doesn’t need their permission to get married. To Abby’s chagrin, Eszter wants to have a relationship with her parents.

 

Both young women are socially conscious. Eszter’s portfolio project at UWI–the feasibility of pairing those with resources with those without by opening a hybrid high-end resort that subsidizes low-income housing–evoked equal parts admiration and skepticism. Insofar as Abby knows, Eszter abandoned it as impractical. She tells Abby she is going to Miami to think things through. Abby, in turn, imagines that Eszter is getting cold feet. Has her father talked her out of getting married?

 

Bigger shocks await. Abby has actually gone to Isla Colel, a Mexican island off the Yucatan peninsula. (It’s an invention, though it shares some physical characteristics with Isla Mujeres near Cancun.)  Abby is devastated but filled with questions when she discovers that Eszter died of anaphylaxis there after accidentally consuming orejas cookies that contained nuts. Where was her EpiPen, which she so assiduously carried everywhere? Why didn’t she write and where is her journal? Why did Eszter lie to Abby about her whereabouts? Abby is inconsolable, hence she puts her job on de facto hold to go to Isla Colel, grieve, and investigate.

 

The bulk of the novel takes place on the island, which holds surprises of its own. The titular ferry to the mainland only runs once a week. It was once a tourist destination until a hurricane blasted its infrastructure. It is now home to an offbeat, tightknit assortment of expatriates, and locals who don’t find them as charming as they think they are. The oldest emigrant is German-born Rita, who acts as an experienced elder to the non-native community. Among the others on the island is hyper-sensitive Brady, who left his homophobic home in Australia; LA-born naturalist Pedro; and Amari, a gorgeous lesbian. The expats are carefree and gay-positive, as if a band of 20^th century hippies were crossed with 21^st century college students. (One wonders if Bartz intended her title to be a faint pun!)

 

 Most of the ex-pats rent from grumpy islander Gloria, whose husband Esteban is a fisherman whose fair-weather boat is one of the few private vessels on Isla Colel. He holds his views inside, but it seems as if everyone on the island holds secrets of one sort or another. Thus, Abby’s search for answers runs up against what is not said, temperamental WiFi, diversions, bad weather, Eszter’s lies, and dissuasion. Abby is suspicious of everyone she encounters, but how does one investigate without trusting someone or hastily jumping to conclusions?

 

NA (new adult) readers will probably find The Last Ferry Out satisfying and sensitive. As an older reviewer, I admired the strong framework Bartz established and her attempts to normalize non-heterosexuals. Yet, I also felt that the novel packed less wallop than it should have. There was too much petulance from major characters old enough to know better, and too many telegraphed clues and coincidences. The post-island revelations perhaps soothe, but they made me think of Hitchcock’s warning.  

 

If Bartz’s target audience is indeed the NA sector, The Last Ferry Out is the ticket aboard. Older readers, though, may long for something–for lack of a better term–more literary.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

What's On at the Rose Art Museum

 

Carrington, The Last Resort (homage to Mexico?)

 

 

Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver

Hugh Hayden: Home Work

Surrealism Then and Now

(All through June 1, 2025)

Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University

415 South Street, Waltham, Massachusetts

Wednesday-Sunday 11-5

 

I had never been to the Rose Art Museum or the campus of Brandeis University before. Although it’s inside Route 95/128 and is now considered a Boston ‘burb, you pretty have to drive to it as the MTA won’t get you near enough. If you go on a weekend, though, it’s an easy drive back to Alewife where you can stash your car and ride the Red Line into Boston. I took a chance and drove into Harvard Square where, miraculously, I found a parking spot. 

 

Pastoral 1950. Note the wink to Manet's dejeuner sur l'herbe

 

 

The main objective was the see paintings and drawings of Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), who was born in England but spent most of her life in Mexico. She came from wealth but rejected bourgeois society and English culture but, then again, there wasn’t much she did rebel against. She was influenced by German surrealist Max Ernst and upon meeting him, the two became lovers that very night. 

 

Nephesh as the Soul in a State of Sleep (dreams, the soul, the Kabbala all in one!)

 

 

Carrington is often considered that last of the surrealists, though that’s a problematic handle and many consider her more of a symbolist like Paul Gaugin or Odilon Rédon. There’s quite a lot of that in Carrington’s work, her major themes being nature, animals, myth, and the female body. (She would later identify with women’s liberation.) Yet her work also fits surrealist ideas of dreams, emotions, and the subconscious mind with all of its illogic and troubling aspects. Unlike most surrealists, though, she had no interest in Freud; like some of them, she had a psychotic breakdown (treated with electroshock, and barbiturates), and like many sought asylum in Mexico during World War Two. She and Ernst split when he was arrested by the Nazis as a “degenerate.” Peggy Gugenheim got him to the United States and married him! Carrington took up with a poet, whom she married and divorced.

 

Here are a few more works on display at the Rose. In my mind it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t fit snugly in any art movement. She was fiercely independent and I suspect she was doing her own thing, as we used to say back in the day.

 

Nunscape at Manzanillo

 

 

 

Noah's Ark. (He has too many deer!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Rose is, however, spotlighting surrealism in a broad sense. Also on display is the intriguing work of Dallas-born Manhattanite Hugh Hayden (1983-). His acclaimed Home Work series shows him working in his favorite medium, wood. He adorns desks in thorns and branches growing on them and through them as if the desks are the Ur root of a living thicket. Hayden enjoys the irony and whimsy involved in taking familiar objects and transforming them.

 

 

He doesn’t always work in wood, though. Another series involves taking cookware and making them into masks, displaying bones as a playful take on “American Gothic,” or make think of Siberia through the use of a small hut and a several big mirrors. I suppose we could label this surrealism, though we might just want to call it clever.  

 

 

 

As a boy he was encouraged to participate in sports, which he hated. I’m pretty sure these works fall into a category best called “revenge!”

 

 

 

 

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Surrealism Then and Now seeks to take surrealism out of the past and into the present. It was my least favorite exhibit at the Rose for the simple reason that I found myself spending more time appreciating the old “masters,” if you will than newer works we might read as surrealist. It’s a compact display, but it perhaps doesn’t do justice to hang younger artists in the same gallery as De Chirico, Ernst, Sage, Tanguay, and Kahlo. (For the record, Kahlo never identified as one.)

 

I get it that curators want to unbind surrealism from a specific moment in time. As a historian rather than an art historian, I think it’s a discussion worth having, but I generally end up feeling that most movements should be placed amidst their historical circumstances. Most of what I saw was trying too hard to be seen as surrealism and hence seemed derivative. But here are several that work. 

 

Gregory Crewsdon, Ophelia

 

 

 

Rona Podnick, Red Bowl