Twenty-nine-year-old Lucy Jarrett, the protagonist of Kim Edwards’ newest novel, The Lake of Dreams, is about to pass through several invisible doors, though when the novel begins, she doesn’t know it.
Lucy is about to turn thirty; she’s lost her job; she’s spent her twenties moving around the globe, staying as far as possible from her hometown, Lake of Dreams, New York, and she’s reached a stale point in her relationship with her boyfriend Yoshi. It’s time to wade on in, or move on. The frequent earth tremors in Japan, where Lucy lives when the story opens, frighten her. By the end of the book, Lucy knows that accepted personal histories, like the earth’s crust, are not always as solid as they seem; and that energies surfacing from the remote past can change the future’s course.
When Lucy returns to Lake of Dreams for a visit, she finds transition there, too: her childhood home on the lake is falling into disrepair, her widowed mother, now in her fifties, longs for a smaller place in town; her younger brother is about to become a father; and her childhood sweetheart, whom Lucy had abandoned, has become a successful artist with a small son. Meanwhile, Lucy’s shifty uncle Art, the family’s economic dreadnaught, is pressing her mother to sell the lake house so him so that he can develop it, along with the surrounding marshes. Her cousin Joey is as condescending as ever.
Annoyed that her mother is seeing someone, has cut her hair, and is getting rid of longtime possessions, Lucy retreats to a cupola room in the lake house, where she’d liked to play as a child. Comforted by static images of her parents, their marriage, and her childhood, Lucy admits, “I didn’t really like it, not one bit, that some man I’d never met was sending my mother flowers.”
Using her hereditary talents at lock-picking, Lucy opens an old chest in the cupola, and there finds evidence of a forgotten ancestor, Rose Jarrett. Rose had pushed beyond the restrictive circumstances of her time to make bold and refreshing choices that had caused her embarrassed family to shun her and conceal her philosophical and artistic legacy. Lucy had never heard of her.
It is this ancestor’s story, not Lucy’s, that becomes the novel’s rose window. Initially passive, bound by 19th century conventions, Rose later notes that when she remembered pivotal events in her early life, “my face would burn at how little I had cared for myself, and what might happen to my one and only life. But I was very young, and I had no power, and I believed this was a fate I could not question.” But Rose did begin to question her fate, and, though a series of painful choices, to change it.
In reconstructing Rose’s past, Lucy begins to illuminate her own, and that of her parents. She learns to her shock that she was not, as she had always believed, the last person to see her father alive on the night he had drowned in the Lake of Dreams when Lucy was just fifteen. By the time she learns that life-changing fact, she has seen Rose’s wise counsel, written nearly a century before:
For this is what I have learned in my short life: do not act out of anger. Act from love, or not at all.
I have seen it, how anger makes a space for what I must call evil. This is what I had come to understand, going to…where people suffered, where they died, and where grief and anger infected those who loved them as surely as any illness did, as insidious as any virus….
This is what I used to think, that some people were simply good and others were not, and that I of course, was good. But now I think instead that evil is a force in the world, a force that seeks, and it finds its way into our lives through anger and loss, through sadness and betrayal; like mold on bread, like rot on an apple, it takes hold.
In opening Rose’s box of secrets, and in revealing that her family’s stories about itself omitted several crucial elements, Lucy opens herself to a more expansive future.
I read this book while moving from one comfortable spot in the house to another, on a blistering July afternoon when it was too hot to ride horseback. It was the perfect sort of story for that sort of day.
While I found Lucy less than compelling as a character, I dismissed that as due to age disparity. I no longer remember very well how it felt to be twenty-nine, and to think that whatever one did with one’s “one and only life” was really all that important. Still, I admired Lucy’s initiative, and sympathized with her unrealizable wish to trap her mother and her family myths in amber so that she could be the traveler, and they the reliable home point, always still. I also appreciated the novel’s emphasis on women’s contributions to family legacies; in so many family histories, the women all but disappear, even their names forever lost.
Author Kim Edwards, a professor at the University of Kentucky, also wrote The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, set in Lexington, Kentucky; and short-story collection, The Secrets of a Fire King.
