Flash is a photojournalist, and her husband --- who is named
Brando but she calls Wonderboy for his Gatsby-esque persona --- is
a war correspondent. Together, they make a strong team that fears
nothing when entering into some of the world's most dangerous
situations. Their relationship has blossomed beautifully, buoyed by
the remarkable stress of the life-and-death traumas they see
exploding, some quite literally, all around them. However, when a
rogue letter from a pretend "friend" shows up in her mail packet
from New York while Brando is off in the war zone, Flash starts to
come into contact with deep-seated fears about her marriage and the
state of her life in general.

Marriage as a war zone is not the newest perspective on this
stately institution, but Ana Menendez puts it to good use here. We
get the barest of glimpses into Brando's character before he is
outed as a nasty, philandering, uncaring big shot with a
self-esteem issue. Flash finds herself unable to confront him by
phone as he struggles with his work in Iraq. She keeps getting work
herself, and her travels in Istanbul result in her becoming
acquainted with and increasingly charmed by a mysterious young
woman in traditional garb who helps Flash survey her life with a
very unconventional perspective. Gradually, she learns to face the
hard truths about her marriage, her ambitions and her husband.

Menendez is a fantastic writer; with the most pristine prose,
she can relate the most obscene or disturbing emotions. Style is
often not addressed as a plus in fiction these days, but Menendez,
like Joan Didion, strips her dramas to the sparest skeleton,
highlighting the inanities of wartime discomfort and marital
discord by taking good characters and forcing them into
associations and situations in which they can do nothing but tell
the truth. Her spare prose is a truth serum that makes her
characters as forthcoming as they could be without bogging down the
inherent drama of both the background and the foreground of the
story.

I do feel like the Iraq War became the backdrop of this conflict
because of its timeliness and not because it was the
culture against which all this other emotional spaghetti could be
thrown and stuck. The struggles of this intelligent and thoughtful
woman could take place anywhere, but the exotic nature of THE LAST
WAR only adds to the emotional resonance of its far-reaching
plot.