53 pages • 1 hour read
The Last One at the Wedding
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Themes
Taking Pride in a Working-Class Identity
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses death, addiction, suicide, violence, and sexual content.
The relationship between class and identity is one of this novel’s key thematic focal points. Although Frank, a UPS driver, is perhaps the most overt example of character who derives his sense of self from his class position, Rekulak also engages with the importance of having price in a working-class identity through his depiction of Tammy, Maggie, and Aidan.
Frank is the embodiment of working-class pride. As a lifelong UPS driver, he is employed in a manual labor job that did not require higher education. He sees this as a source of honor and self-respect. He is a self-reflective individual and understands that the skills he learned as a UPS driver have also served him well in other areas of his life: He is able to solve problems and tackle difficult jobs on his own. He does not shy away from hard work and is largely self-sufficient. He has a strong work ethic and is dependable. He also takes seriously his role as a community member and family man: He is always willing to lend a helping hand and sincerely wants to serve the people around him. He does not consider himself “poor” and is grateful for the financial security that his career has provided him.
Tammy, too, sees honor in being working class. As a home healthcare worker who also takes in foster children through the state system, Tammy defines herself in large part through the service work she does with people in need. She, too, sees her humanism as rooted in the kind of solidarity she identifies as a key part of the working classes, and although her work is tiring, she is devoted to both her patients and foster children. Although she is momentarily swayed by the promise of money from the Gardners, she does not have the kind of shame that Maggie does for being working class. Even as she contemplates an easier retirement, she continues to care for those around her in a way that embodies the values she learned in a working-class family.
Maggie has a more fraught relationship with class than her father or aunt. She is ashamed of her working-class upbringing and does not share Frank’s respect for working-class values. Although Frank and Tammy do not hesitate to help or care for others, Maggie is self-serving. She is single-mindedly focused on career and wealth accumulation and defines herself by her financial success. For Maggie, being wealthy is the only “acceptable” position, and she cannot be happy until she herself becomes as affluent as the Gardners. This becomes her downfall, reinforcing the text’s message that one should take pride in their working-class roots.
Aidan, too, has a complex relationship with wealth and struggles to define himself against his family’s privilege. Always uncomfortable with affluence and not business-minded, Aidan feels out of place in his family. This is in part why he chooses to paint “ordinary” people: “characters he spotted while walking around the streets of Boston—schoolteachers, Uber drivers, bouncers, bartenders, nurses, and cashiers” (26). He longs for a life in which he could derive his sense of self from something other than his inherited wealth and wishes that he could be something other than a Gardner. Unlike Frank and Tammy, Aidan realizes that he has inherited a set of beliefs, practices, and values that do not help him, bring him happiness, or allow him to help others. Through Aidan, Rekulak suggests that wealth and high social class can instill in someone a poor set of values and little sense of community, while a working-class background can lead to the opposite.
The Strength and Pitfalls of Parental Love
The strength of parental love is another of this novel’s key thematic focal points, although the text is equally committed to illustrating the way that parental love can make parents ignorant to the less savory aspects of their children’s character. Frank’s relationship with Maggie is the most overt example of parental love in the novel, although Rekulak also engages with this theme through its depiction of Tammy and Vicky.
Frank’s role as a father is important to him, and being a good father, first to Maggie and then to Abigail, is a key aspect of his characterization. He takes over the bulk of the parenting when his wife dies. Although Tammy helps him out considerably, it is up to Frank to raise Maggie. He dedicates his life to her, working as hard as possible to provide for her financially and emotionally. He is an understanding and supportive father, and he dotes on Maggie, puts her through school, and supports her in all of her endeavors. However, he focuses so much on Maggie’s positive attributes that he misses much of her true personality. She is manipulative and unempathetic even as a young person. He writes off the various situations she gets herself into as having been the fault of the other girls involved and even looks the other way when he realizes that she likely committed arson.
Frank loves Maggie so much that he cannot reconcile himself to the idea that she is a deeply flawed individual. He even goes so far as to blame himself for Maggie’s bad behavior. He mulls over his parenting “mistakes” and thinks that he might have caused Maggie to become cold and manipulative by punishing her too frequently. He recalls: “I went back to revisit the classics, all my worst parenting failures. All the nights I forced Maggie to stay at the dinner table and clear her plate, all the times I grounded her for bad grades and blown curfews and chores left incomplete” (156). Although it is evident to Tammy and others that Maggie’s lack of personal ethics is grounded in her own inability to feel empathy and her deeply manipulative nature, Frank still worries that he was not lenient enough with her and that her behavior is a kind of rebellion. The representation of his parenting conveys the message that parental love is strong but that parents should ensure that they can see past it and think critically about their children’s wrongdoings.
Tammy and Vicky also help Rekulak to explore the complexities of parenting. Tammy is not a biological mother but has devoted her life to caring for foster children. She often takes the “toughest” cases and navigates tricky behavioral issues while remaining grounded in an ethics of caring that centers the needs of the child above her own. In part because she has spent so much time dealing with tough cases and difficult behavior, Tammy understands that identity is complex and that individuals have a mix of positive and negative attributes. She recognizes Maggie’s manipulative nature early on and accepts her in spite of it, even while Frank still perceives Maggie as an “angelic” daughter. Vicky, too, has a complex and nuanced understanding of parenting and children. As a mother to a child who experienced addiction and died as a result, she realizes that parents often refuse to admit that their children have faults. She knows that she was guilty of this and emerged from the death of her child with a more circumspect understanding of what it means to be a parent. Tammy and Vicky’s pragmatic approaches reinforce the novel’s message that parents must not be ignorant to their children’s faults; they also suggest that seeing their faults clearly can be a form of love.
The Corrupting Influence of Wealth
The corrupting influence of wealth is this novel’s most overt theme and is closely tied to its exploration of the relationship between social class and identity. Maggie’s characterization is the clearest example the author provides for the corrupting influence that affluence has on individuals, but Catherine and Errol’s relationship also embodies the way that wealth adversely impacts families. Additionally, Aidan, Dawn, and Gwendolyn all become literal casualties of the Gardner family, and their deaths speak to the negative aspects of extreme wealth.
Maggie lost her mother in childhood but still grew up in a loving home with her father and her aunt caring for her. Although not wealthy, the Szatowski family did not have material wants and Frank was able to provide financially for Maggie, even taking her on periodic vacations. However, Maggie characterizes both Frank and her childhood as “poor” and becomes increasingly dazzled by the Gardner family’s wealth. She is willing to do anything to maintain her newfound class status, including engaging in criminal activity. She helps the Gardners to cover up Dawn’s death, is complicit in the coverup of Gwendolyn’s death, and does not object when the Gardners reveal their plans to “take care” of Abigail. Wealth has corrupted Maggie, and she loses any remaining commitment to living a moral life.
Wealth also damages Errol’s relationship with Catherine. Frank and his wife had been deeply in love, committed to their relationship, and supportive co-parents. Their marriage is an exemplar of long-term commitment. Errol and Catherine, on the other hand, have a deeply damaged marriage. Errol uses his power and influence to have a series of affairs that are so painful for Catherine to bear that she turns to alcohol as a coping mechanism. She has no power in their relationship and can do nothing to make her husband alter his behavior. Errol sees no problem in his serial philandering because, in his estimation, “powerful” men require multiple (younger) partners and it is his right as a captain of industry to behave as he does. He even goes so far as to procure escorts for his friends and tries to set Frank up with a high-class sex worker. It is evident that having access to everything he wants at any given time has had a terrible impact on Errol’s character.
In addition to showing the corrupting influence of wealth on Maggie and the Gardner family, the novel also shows what happens to individuals who get in the Gardners’ way: Dawn and then Gwendolyn die because of their relationship with the Gardners, and Aidan’s suicide is the direct result of the guilt he feels over his role in the coverup of Dawn’s death. At the end of the novel, the family is poised to murder Abigail because she might be able to incriminate them. Although wealth adversely impacts several individuals in the novel, its corrupting influence directly causes the death of Dawn, Gwendolyn, and Aidan, each of whom pays the ultimate price for the Gardners’ affluence.
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