Last Resort

What compels a thirtysomething Canadian novelist to set her debut in a Florida community teeming with octogenarians? In Palm Meridian, Grace Flahive could be writing about her own precarious future. The year is 2067. The polar ice caps have melted and tropical storms batter the coast. The “sprawling Disney empire” is little more than barnacled rubble. “By now, a third of the United States was without a reliable power grid,” Flahive writes. “California was on fire more than it wasn’t. There was a generally held belief in Florida that the whole of Orlando could explode in a giant fireball, and Washington wouldn’t know or care for at least a week.”

But inside the Palm Meridian Retirement Resort, queer women in their seventies and eighties —“precious things on an increasingly tumultuous planet”— are getting tipsy in hat-making class, podcasting in their spare time, and organizing tap dance recitals. Even though the lights flicker and cell service is spotty, the croquet mallets are swinging and the hula hoops are spinning.

In this absurd environment, Hannah Cardin, a seventy-seven-year-old resident with terminal cancer, has chosen to end her own life with medical assistance. “The suffering would be great, the pain likely unbearable. Life would not be life,” she decides. We meet the former engineer on the morning before her scheduled death. Her clique — Christine, a retired journalist; Esme, a friend from university; Nate, the “calm, capable” bartender; and Ricky, a twenty-five-year-old staffer — and a boisterous supporting cast have gathered to plan an all-night celebration of her life. The story unfolds over the course of the day leading up to the festivities. Throughout, flashbacks dip into Hannah’s past, including her childhood in Montreal, the fast ascent of her eco-energy company, and her enduring friendship with her business partner, Luke. Hovering over it all is her long-lost love, Sophie, whose invitation to the festivities was “safely delivered,” though she has yet to respond.

Many millennials and zoomers tend to picture the future as a slow-motion apocalypse consisting of ecological collapse, political chaos, and social isolation. Instead of looking at despair, Flahive brings us into the raucous minds of a group of seniors who have chosen to be joyful. More than how people will die, the author wonders how they will live — and how they’ll party as the flood waters rise. This is a utopia tucked inside a dystopia. Some readers may find the world-building too light — and the perspectives too lighthearted — but others will recognize it as a hopeful vision.

Flahive finds comedy in the morbid: “For the first day in ten years, Hannah wasn’t wearing sunscreen. Given the cremation, she figured she could afford a bit of crisp.” Partygoers (or mourners) arrive bearing hugs, kisses, and parting gifts — but “when would she use them?” Even today’s youthful quirks and trends endure into old age. The Pomodoro time management technique inspires the resort’s baseball team, whose uniforms sport “the logo of a determined-looking tomato, grasping a clock and leaping into the sky.” The team captain shrugs: “Couldn’t get these folks to practice for more than twenty-five minutes, so we leaned into it.”

Although set in the Sunshine State, the story frequently drifts back to winter. Raised by a Zamboni driver, Hannah grew up in a mostly unheated apartment in Mile End, in a family just scraping by. Enduring extreme temperatures became the problem she devoted her career to solving, culminating in her invention of “a groundbreaking heating and cooling technology.” Wintertime also became synonymous with love; Hannah met Sophie, an Olympic ski jumper, on a chilly day in Manhattan. Although their relationship eventually unravels, Hannah feels that “Sophie would always come back to her, in a way, with the snow. The winters would return her, or at least the feeling of her.” In a novel steeped in finality — of love, of time, of the world as we know it — snow suggests the cyclical nature of life and memory.

While Palm Meridian has a strong emotional core, its execution is inconsistent. The prose suffers from an overreliance on telling rather than showing. Describing a pitch Hannah made at a turning point in her career, Flahive writes, “Once she’d got through the preamble and onto the science of things, she’d felt the nerves rise off her body like vapor, and her sluggish brain picked up pace.” Even the early days of Hannah and Sophie’s relationship are condensed into a few breezy lines. In glossing over key moments, Flahive flattens Hannah and the memories she confronts during her final hours.

The novel’s biggest structural challenge lies in its large ensemble. From a couple composed of “tall Eileen” and “small Eileen” to Esme’s jilted lover to Nate’s would‑be girlfriend, the resort is full of personalities — perhaps too many. New characters arrive often, each one introduced with a flurry of eccentricities, only to fade as quickly as they appeared. The group feels more like a sketch board of character ideas than like a coherent community.

Nonetheless, to read Palm Meridian is to be in the company of a writer willing to ask big, messy questions. What does it mean to live a good life? How do we let go of the people we love? Can we build something beautiful within ruins? Flahive, clearly, is unafraid to answer them with wild, warm-hearted optimism.