The protagonist of The Lake of Dreams is Lucy Jarrett, a woman in her late-twenties living in Japan with her half English-half Japanese boyfriend, Yoshi. Feeling adrift without a job and concerned about her mother, Lucy flies back home to a quaint little town called Lake of Dreams in upstate New York. Built almost a hundred years ago, her family home is in a constant state of disrepair and stands on the edge of the lake the town is named after.
The book really starts when Lucy finds a stack of letters locked away under a window seat in her childhood home. The writer of the letters is a female ancestor Lucy has never heard of while the recipient of the letters is her great-grandfather, Joseph whose story is part of the family lore.
The plot primarily follows Lucy’s tracking down the identities and stories of her female ancestor and her estranged daughter. However, many obvious questions, like who locked away the letters and why, are never answered. The carousel of objects hidden away in the bowels of this house borders on the improbable or ridiculous, depending on the extent of your suspension of disbelief. And the novel is the weaker for it.
An undercurrent of making sense of the past and makes peace with it in order to move ahead runs deep through The Lake of Dreams. One such is the guilt Lucy carries for her father’s unresolved death in a fishing accident ten years ago. The author reiterates several times that Lucy’s nomadic lifestyle and lack of stability in her romantic relationships is a result of unprocessed grief and guilt over her father’s death.
Kim Edwards’ writing is heavy on description and metaphor and gets a bit tedious especially where it slows down the pace of the plot. Metaphors of water and fire are pretty much drummed into the writing. There’s also the metaphor of land and earthquakes which predictably signals a life-altering change in the protagonist’s life.
As much as I enjoy lyrical writing and an apt metaphor, a novel called The Lake of Dreams featuring a house situated on the edge of a lake with a protagonist who is a hydrologist and prone to revelatory dreams has all the subtlety of a jackhammer!
The biggest letdown, however, is how clues regarding her ancestor’s life keep landing at Lucy’s feet even though what she is investigating took place almost a century ago. You might think, like I did, that searching for that information would be full of hiccups and dead-ends. Not in The Lake of Dreams. Here they are laid out on a platter and to be found within a comfortable driving distance!
The strongest element of The Lake of Dreams for me is how Edwards weaves in the history of the suffragettes taking on legal and social injustices and how Lucy’s ancestor, Rose strove to find her place in the sun during an era when women were thought of as merely wives and housekeepers. To have Lucy dusting off the sands of anonymity from Rose’s story and her role in their family’s history is where the heart of this novel lies. It reminded me of a line by Virginia Woolf,
“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
The subplots in The Lake of Dreams are disjointed and appear to exist merely to provide a break from the main thrust of the novel and induce some narrative tension into the plot. The same is true of the love triangle between Yoshi, Lucy and her childhood sweetheart, Keegan. It starts off fine but ends up flatter than day-old champagne.
I understand that books have limitations of length but even so, characters feel realistic only when they are more than cardboard cutouts and act in accordance with their own personalities, motivations and goals. Instead, in The Lake of Dreams, most characters just float into whatever position Lucy’s story needs them to be.
Kim Edwards fails to make us care about her protagonist even as she hands her the benefit of a first-person narrative. Maybe it is because things come too easily to Lucy and the internal conflicts she faces just melt away into nothingness when convenient. That makes for neither a memorable character nor an engaging story.
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