THE LAST GOOD CHANCE

A winning debut from quarterly-fiction writer Barbash, this about a young architect who tries to rebuild his crumbling hometown in upstate New York.

Lakeland, New York, is one of those likable old small towns that no one wants to live in anymore. On the coast of Lake Ontario, not far from Syracuse, it was mostly settled by Irish, Italian, and French-Canadian immigrants and became a fairly prosperous factory town in the 19th century. Now all the mills are long gone and the town fathers spend most of their time trying to figure out a way of getting jobs into the region. Thirty-odd years ago they set up a toxic-waste incinerator on the lakefront, but the EPA closed it down. Now they’ve hired a local boy, Jack Lambeau, to devise a unified development plan for the city—à la South Street Seaport or Faneuil Hall—that would bring in tourist dollars. Jack grew up in Lakeland but was glad to get out and study architecture at Brown, though after graduation he found that all he could do in Manhattan was work on penny-ante zoning projects. Lakeland is his first real chance to make a name for himself as a designer and developer, so he moves back with his fiancée Anne, and the two slowly try to make a life for themselves away from the limelight. But problems soon crop up. Anne, a painter, finds herself more and more bored with small-town society, and more and more jittery about their upcoming wedding. Jack finds the locals less receptive to his vision than he had hoped. And his brother Harris gets himself into big trouble while working secretly to dispose of some leftover toxic waste that the mayor had assured Jack was long gone. Is it possible to go home again? Those who try may end up wondering why they bothered.

A nice mixture of narrative, history, setting, and character: an amiable story drawn by a sure hand.