The Last White Man: A Novel

Like Anders, Oona is a young, physically fit character who starts the novel as a white person and later becomes a person of color. She is a yoga instructor, having dropped out of college to return home to care for her mother after the death of her brother from substance use disorder. The narrator describes her as “the most junior of the primary instructors at the studio” who is also in high demand because of her appearance and youth (39). She considers becoming a social-media influencer but lacks confidence in her photography skills and her physical appearance. She dabbles in acting, writing, and a start-up company before teaching yoga. Still, it was not her “unambiguous calling” (39). She is a much less settled and stable character than Anders.

Oona’s name has two meanings. Its Scottish version derives from the Latin word for one or universal, while its Anglicized version means lamb. The name has a new-age sound, which matches her work as a yoga instructor. Her relationship with her mother develops from one of emotional estrangement to an inverted relationship in which she becomes the mother figure caring for a weaker or vulnerable person. Her feelings for Anders also develop and deepen over the course of the novel. Although she is fond of Anders, in her mind, it was a relationship of convenience—a high school romance that was restarted when she moved home after her brother’s death. She plans to ignore his calls and allow the relationship to wither away, but she finds herself unable to do so, and grows increasingly attached until she addresses him as “love” and realizes that she likes the way it sounds (145). She is Anders’s romantic interest throughout the novel, changing from a casual girlfriend to his wife and the mother of his child. Oona is the one character who welcomes the change, practicing before the actual event by photoshopping images and applying makeup. Oona remains stable after her change, as “she herself was still Oona but not still Oona, she was changed for having changed, although precisely how she could not say” (39).

The omniscient, third-person narrator is another important character in the novel, although one that remains a non-diegetic narrator who does not interact with other characters in the novel. The narrator does, however, interact on occasion with the reader. This is called breaking the fourth wall, a term more typically used to describe the visual arts when the character or narrator addresses the audience by looking and speaking directly into the camera. One early example of this occurs when the narrator describes the young couple, and invites the reader to join in appreciating their youthful beauty:

Anders worked at a gym and Oona taught yoga, and their bodies were youthful and fit, and if we, writing or reading this, were to find ourselves, indulging in a kind of voyeuristic pleasure at their coupling, we could perhaps be forgiven, for they too were experiencing something not entirely dissimilar (17).

The act is somewhat voyeuristic for Oona and Anders, as they were being intimate for the first time since he changed. However, it is not an uncommon feature for a narrator in a postmodern text to speak directly to the reader, or to be self-aware. The narrator suggests that this interaction is equivalent to writing or reading and uses the first-person plural pronoun “we” to further connect the two.

The omniscient narrator has unfettered access to the characters, yet does not offer commentary on their words or deeds. Instead, the narrator acts as a reporter, simply telling the reader what a character says, does, or feels. The ambiguity of the text is increased by the way in which the narrator tells the story, through run-on sentences, juxtapositions, and repetitions. It is never quite clear if it is the character or the narrator who is so uncertain and shifting.

A secondary character in the novel is Oona’s mother. She is the character through which the theme of conspiracy theories is most directly explored, although Oona’s own online presence is also relevant to the theme. Oona’s mother is never identified by her own name. She is always named in relation to her daughter and often described by the narrator from Oona’s point of view. Oona’s mother was suffering after her son’s death, and this is the reason why Oona gave up her life in the city to come home and care for her. In the text, the older woman is first described negatively, stating that she had not always been a “fantasist”—at least not when Oona and her brother were children (21). The choice of fantasist is unusual, as the word typically used, at least in the US, is fanatic. It is possible that the word is a neologism, or new word developed to define someone like her who has become committed to online conspiracy theories. Oona revises her description, connecting her mother’s fanaticism to fantasy by explaining that previously “the fantasy she inhabited was a common one” (21), including beliefs that life was fair and good and people got what they deserved.

Her mother’s online life was a kind of fantasy or virtual existence, and one in which she and other conspiracy-theory adherents believed that there was a plot against people like her that had been brewing for decades, maybe even centuries (49). She is physically sickened by seeing her white daughter being intimate with a person of color, and she becomes ill when her own daughter later changes. One of the last characters to change in the novel, she eventually accepts her new self, as well as her daughter, and later, her granddaughter. In that sense, she is a dynamic character. However, her desire to share her legacy of whiteness with her granddaughter suggests that she has not entirely evolved as a character in the same way that Oona and Anders have.