cover image Story of the Lake

Story of the Lake

Laura Chester. Faber & Faber, $24.95 (382pp) ISBN 978-0-571-19861-0

This sweeping American saga follows the destinies of four wealthy Midwestern families (the Hewitts, Welleses, Ulrichs and Schraegers) who spend their summers at fictional Nogowogotic Lake in Wisconsin. The story opens at the turn of the century as 14-year-old Isabelle Merrick is washing a statue in a garden of ``larkspur, dahlias, roses, phlox'' when a dog appears with a half-dead capon in its jaws--an apt metaphor for the intrusion, during the next several decades, of some of life's ugliness into the beauty-filled existences of these founders and heirs of beer, dairy and department-store fortunes. As the tides of the Depression, Prohibition and the two world wars wash over the well-wrought characters, violence, suicide, fatal illness and changing financial prospects punctuate their lives--as does Isabelle's plunge into the suffragette movement. Still, the natural glories of the lake, and the value of family life, endure. Chester's supple prose and eye for sensuous period detail capture well the rhythms of life and death at the lake, and while some may find the privileged self-absorption of her characters a bit cloying, she makes it clear through their joys and sufferings that, contrary to Fitzgerald, the rich aren't different from you and me--and are worthy of the attention and compassion that she lavishes on them in this fine novel. (May)