The Last White Man: A Novel

“He was overtaken by emotion, not so much shock, or sorrow, though those things were there too, but above all the face replacing his filed him with anger, or rather, more than anger, an unexpected, murderous rage. He wanted to kill the colored man who confronted him here in his home, to extinguish the life animating this other’s body, to leave nothing standing but himself, as he was before.”

This sentence is an early example of the writing style employed throughout the text, the run-on sentence. While writers often see this as a grammatical error, the author uses them purposefully, often to evoke the interior thoughts or monologue of a character. Racist attitudes toward people of color are exposed, as the main emotion Anders feels in seeing he is now brown is one of murderous rage. The quote also suggests the postcolonial concept of “the Other” and a kind of internalized oppression or hatred, since the man he wants to kill is himself.

“[A]nd stripping, frantic, his penis, unremarkable in size and in heft, unremarkable except in not being his.”

This phrase is part of a paragraph long sentence in which Anders investigates different parts of his body to see if or how they had changed. He notices and explores the texture of his hair, the skin on his hand, the color of his toenails, and finally, his penis. He strips frantically because that is such a personal and intimate part of his identity.

This phrase is part of a paragraph long sentence in which Anders investigates different parts of his body to see if or how they had changed. He notices and explores the texture of his hair, the skin on his hand, the color of his toenails, and finally, his penis. He strips frantically because that is such a personal and intimate part of his identity.

This quote introduces the character Oona to the reader. While the concept of “transactional” has been used in psychotherapy since the 1950s, it has entered more common parlance and practice toward the end of the 20th century, perhaps most clearly with the concept of “friends with benefits.” Contemporary concerns about self-care are also evident in the quote. The entire relationship placed within a capitalist framework, including words such as “cashed out” or “debt” being used to describe emotions.

“[A]nd 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, pale-skinned Oona watching herself performing her grind with a dark-skinned stranger, Anders the stranger watching the same.”

The unexplained change is more than just skin deep; it results in a new person who is “other” or “a stranger.” While the novel is primarily told in the third-person voice, here the narrator slips into first person plural (we), using the device of the addressed reader. Using this makes the reader implicit in the voyeurism of the narrator.

“It was the usual sort of thing, this time about white people suddenly not being white and Oona saw another message from Anders alert itself to her on the screen of her phone, but she did not read it, and instead asked her mother how she knew this and her mother said, from online.”

One of the themes of the novel is online conspiracy theories and disinformation. Oona’s mother falls deep into online rabbit holes, increasingly convinced that Armageddon has arrived with the change, and that the word will descend into chaos and cannibalism (149). Oona tries to dissuade her mother from believing everything she reads online, but ironically, in this instance, it is true that people’s skin color is changing from white to brown.

“‘You’re so beautiful,’ her mother said as she was leaving. ‘You should get a gun.’”

This phrase exposes the gun culture of the United States, which is steeped in racism, as the mother’s concern is that her beautiful white daughter is vulnerable to the growing population of people of color. Oona’s mother’s racism and paranoia are amplified by the time she spends interacting on social media with white supremacist groups.

“Reports began to emerge from around the country of people changing, reports at first utterly disreputable, and easily disregarded, and roundly mocked, rightly so, but later picked up by reliable voices, as a question to be confirmed, being confirmed, apparently happening.”

Part of the fable-like quality of this novel is that the country is never named. In fact, few details of setting are given. An ill-defined setting is a common characteristic of a fable, as this allows for a universal moral or lesson. While this story is often critical of the spread of conspiracy theories on social media, the conspiracy theories ironically contain a nugget of truth—people are changing. The reasons and forces behind the change, however, are shaped to fit white supremacist beliefs by people like Oona’s mother.

“To his boss, Anders explained his situation, which was not unique, nor contagious, as far as anyone knew, and returned to the gym after a week off, and his boss was waiting for him at the entrance, bigger than Anders remembered him, though obviously the same size, and his boss looked him over and said, ‘I would have killed myself.’

Anders shrugged, unsure how to reply, and his boss added, ‘If it was me.’”

As Anders is one of the earliest to change (the word used to describe becoming dark-skinned), even those who are not overtly racist are concerned about why this is happening and what the ramifications might be. Even though his boss has not changed, he has in relation to Anders’s perception of him not only as an employee, but an employee of color.

“[A]nd the sum of it all was clear, in other words that a white man had indeed shot a dark man, but also that the dark man and the white man were the same.”

This quote summarizes an event that was misunderstood when it happened, and even now ironically remains at some level unclear, despite the assertion of the opposite. A dark man (the term Black is never used) is found shot in front of a house, and it is assumed that he had been a home intruder shot by the white homeowner. Yet the dead man is found in possession of his wallet, phone and wedding ring, and thus was the homeowner who had killed himself.

“[A]nd the more her mother bought, the more Oona bought with her mother, the more it alarmed Oona, the more it made her doubt, and feel uncertain, feel less confident that her mother was wrong, less able to say, for sure, that it was not on its way, crazy, crazy, but perhaps perceptible on the breeze nonetheless, perhaps coming, though it could not possibly be coming, a great, a terrible, storm.”

Oona’s mother, driven to paranoia by her online activities, has become a “prepper”; someone who believes the end of the world is near and begins stockpiling supplies and ammunition. Oona gets caught up in the frenzy, which is shared by many, becoming less certain that the idea was “crazy.”

“Anders said that he was not sure that he was the same person, he had begun by feeling that under the surface it was still him, who else could it be, but it was not that simple, and the way people act around you, it changes what you are, who you are.”

Anders and Oona are constantly questioning their identities since the change began. Anders initially reacted to his own reflection in the mirror with murderous rage, but that could be attributed in part to the shock of unexpected seeing himself in different skin. The change is more than just skin color, however, and the characters repeatedly note that they are and are not themselves. Not only does their identity depend on how they perceive themselves, but also by how they are perceived by others, and according to communication specialists, these two points of view are mutually reinforcing. In terms of race, this means that if society sees certain members of a certain race in a negative light, they may begin to believe it to be true and act accordingly.

“[H]e just had this sense that it was essential not be seen as a threat, for to be seen as a threat, as dark as he was, was to risk one day being obliterated.”

People of color began to fall victim to violent mobs of white people, and Anders whether the rifle his father (who is still white) had given him actually makes him safer. Because his father is white, he is unable to understand the message of “the talk,” a colloquial phrase used to describe parental warnings parents of people of color give that is meant to de-escalate violence and keep them safe. A key element of today’s talk is to avoid being perceived as a threat.

“Yet her phone required some technological feedback, was stuck in some limbo, insisting on a prompt that was not forthcoming, permission, a sign of what it should do next, waiting and waiting through the waiting was over.”

The phone, and perhaps by extension social media technology, seems to be functioning here as a deus ex machina plot device in which something or someone will unexpectedly appear to resolve the problem, or perhaps Oona is waiting for divine intervention to tell her what to do. There may be a critique that people are no longer able to think for themselves but rely on technology to do that work for us. The last sentence is a kind of foreshadowing, that the incessant waiting was over, suggesting that something was about to happen.

“[A]nd maybe that was the point, the point of it was to break him, to break all of them, all of us, yes us, how strange to be forced into such an us.”

This quote is an interior monologue or thoughts passing through the mind of the character Anders, or perhaps the narrator. The quote shows the narrator/Anders puzzling through what he identifies as the rifle’s question—“how much did he want to live” (85) as he contemplates ending his life as had the mistakenly identified home intruder in Chapter 5. The quote begins by using the pronouns “him” and “them” but then switches to us, implicating the reader into this group by force.

“Anders could perceive how self-righteous they were, how certain that he, Anders, was in the wrong, that he was the bandit here, trying to rob them, they who had been robbed already and had nothing left, just their whiteness, the worth of it , and they would not let him take that, not him nor anyone else.”

Anders is confronted by a group of three men, one of whom he believes he recognizes. What is labeled by Anders as self-righteousness is a combination of racism, white privilege, and victimology. They assume that the “dark” man is the “bandit” or outlaw, rather than they who are members of a small vigilante squad. Their white privilege allows them to believe themselves in the right, and their victimology convinces them that they have been robbed, although they still possess their “whiteness,” which Anders himself no longer possesses.

“In the doorway was Oona’s mother and Anders recognized her but she did not recognize Anders, and for a second Anders thought she was going to scream, but she did not scream, instead she ran, or if not ran, she heaved, she heaved herself out of the doorway and down the hall towards her bathroom and before she could make it her guts heaved too and she could not control them.”

Oona’s mother (who is never named) observes her daughter having sex in her childhood bed with an unknown man. This man is Anders, but she does not recognize him, seeing only a “dark” man. Perhaps this is her worst fantasy/nightmare come alive. The repetition of the word heaved suggest that she has lost control of her body as she heads toward her bathroom, which is a foreshadowing of the different kind of heaving she is soon to perform.

“And in any case the melancholy was fleeting, at least it was fleeting that morning, for the lightness was stronger than the melancholy, the sense that she was escaping a prison she desired to escape, for her life had become fraught, and for so long there had been no way out, there had been that feeling, the feeling that there was no way out, but now it seemed that there might be a way out, that she could shed her skin as a snake sheds its skin, not violently, not even coldly, but rather to abandon the confinement of the past, and, unfettered, again, to grow.”

Unlike Anders, who experiences rage at seeing himself changed, for Oona, the emotion is melancholy. She has had time to prepare and even practices being “dark” by covering her white skin with make-up. Her melancholy, usually a prolonged and pensive state, is here fleeting, overcome by the lightness of feeling she has escaped a life of imprisonment. The metaphor of a snake shedding its skin is the use of figurative language to describe her breaking free of the limitations of her former life.

“[A]nd he wondered if people who had been born dark could tell the difference, could tell who had always been this way and who had become dark only recently.”

This is a question that Anders asks himself several times during the novel. He cannot ask anyone directly since the only person he knows who had been a person of color prior to the changes was the “cleaning guy” at the gym, with whom he had never held a real conversation. Because of Anders’s previously held white privilege he had not had to notice the kinds of details that he did now that he had changed. People of color presumably could tell, as they did not have the “privilege” of not knowing these things.

“Anders’s pale father was the only pale person present, the only pale person left in the entire town, for there were by that point no others, and then his casket was closed and his burial was occurring and he was committed to the soil, the last white man, and after that, after him, there was none.”

In this titular quote (the quote that contains the title of the novel), Anders buries his white father who had been sick and dying for most of the text. His death is symbolic of an era of white privilege and even supremacy. His funeral marks a shared sense of loss which is noted in the text just before this quote, which is a double loss of Anders’s father and of their collective whiteness.

“[H]e had married and found a love and lost a love and changed color, and which of these was most significant for him he could not say, but probably, probably it was not the color.”

When renewing her driver’s license, Oona encounters a clerk who had previously been her brother’s lover. Once a beautiful white boy, he was now “a beautiful man with delicate brown eyes and big brown hands” (165). Oona asks if he was happy that he had changed, to which he replies that changing color was only one of the many changes he had experienced, and which he lists in the quote. While for Oona, becoming dark was the biggest change in her life, allowing her to escape her previous existence, for the clerk it was only one of many changes, and not even the most significant. This puts the skin color change into a different and perhaps more balanced perspective.

“[A]nd the funny thing about her tattoos was that they were almost the same color as her skin, or not the same color but the same darkness, and so they looked more like etchings than tattoos, fine and intricate and textured, nearly but not quite invisible, and Oona wondered if the woman had had them done after she had changed, and Oona did not know, but she thought not, or she liked to think not, she liked to think the woman had had them done before, and had changed into them, had changed toward them, so to speak, though it struck Oona just then that it was possible the woman had never changed at all.”

While etching is a style of tattoo, the point being made is that the contrast between ink and skin color is more subtle on dark than pale skin. This causes Oona to wonder if this had been the woman’s choice, or if the contrast had lessened as her skin had darkened. Like Anders, Oona is unable to tell if someone had changed or not but initially assumes that she had, perhaps a vestige of white privilege. It is not until the end that it “struck” Oona that the woman may have been a person of color all along.

“Sometimes if felt like the town was a town in mourning, and the country a country in mourning, and this suited Anders, and suited Oona, coinciding as it did with their own feelings, but at other times it felt like the opposite, that something new was being born, and strangely enough this suited them too.”

Mourning is expression of loss that usually involves symbolic rituals and dress. It is often a shared experience and involves a pause that allows for the processing of loss or death, necessary before people can begin to heal and move on. The funeral of Anders’s father was part of his mourning for the loss of his father. Here it is the town and country that takes a pause to acknowledge its loss, presumably of the whiteness of many of its inhabitants. Yet healing was also beginning, as something “new was being born.” This may also symbolize the new relationship that was being born between Oona and Anders.

“As for Anders’s room, his childhood room, they left it empty, freshly painted and unoccupied, as though a resident had just departed, or a resident was about to arrive, and whether this was done for a particular reason, as a nod to the past, or to the future, or to both, neither Anders nor Oona would, just then have likely wanted to say.”

Earlier, when technology failed, Oona found herself trapped in a kind of limbo, waiting to be told what to do. The situation of this quote is more like a liminal space than limbo, in which a shift from one state to another is going to happen. His childhood room is left empty, perhaps because Anders is leaving his childhood behind or perhaps because it will be the bedroom of future little Anders. The narrator notes that it could mean something, or it could mean nothing, and that it was likely neither Oona nor Anders “just then” would have wanted to specify. This type of ambiguous writing, in meaning and in style, is prevalent throughout the text.