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Homage and Laura Lippman's Wilde Lake
Sep. 25th, 2017 11:52 amI have a complicated relationship with Laura Lippman's work where I tend to find it layered and thoughtful but just a little too bloodless and just a little too cynical; also, she has a book that repeatedly describes a character of exactly my weight as "hulking," and I am petty enough to be bothered by this.
Wilde Lake has not resolved my feelings in one direction or the other. It's a deep, compellingly fractal look at memory and information that is damaged by the fact that none of the characters seem deeply involved, at any time, with anything, and that it is utterly insistent on letting you know that it's a To Kill a Mockingbird homage.
Some of the latter is nicely done, like the beginning which looks at the circumstances in which Luisa's brother Jem--I mean, AJ--got his arm broken--but much of it is clumsily inserted (the obligatory scene where Luisa insults a lower-class boy's table manners and is reprimanded for it) and some of it is even cringe-inducing (the book is careful not to specify the Brants' housekeeper, "Teensy," as black, but it suggests it very strongly and her characterization is stuck in the fifties). Literary homages of this kind, I think, should remind us that there is an essential grandeur to the business of being human. We ought to be reminded, every now and then, that the petty jostling for power in Congress, or within a rural family, can be Shakespearean; that the social norms of who should text whom, and when, can be just as mannered as any exchange between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. But To Kill a Mockingbird is too close in history to work on those terms, and the only neat effect you get from Lippman using it so much is the resonance with the controversy of Go Set a Watchman--Wilde Lake tries to be both novels, dealing with the child's eye view of complications that only reveal more faults in adulthood, and that is slightly cool. But it still seems like borrowed significance that asks the reader to care about Luisa and her family not because of the importance Lippman has invested in them but because we all know Scout and Atticus; it's fanfic with a couple of degrees of separation, neither fish nor fowl, and it would be better if it weren't.
And maybe if it weren't, the novel would have to work a little harder to develop its characters and make their motivations and moralities distinct. As it is, everyone here is sort of low-grade unpleasant while being firmly convinced of their own superiority, which makes for a monotonous emotional palette. Luisa Brant praises her brother for having a midlife crisis that was actually original, for example, but since that crisis involved quitting his job, growing a ponytail, and divorcing his wife for a younger yoga instructor, I'm at a loss as to which part of this, exactly, is supposed to surprise me. (Then again, her brother also wrote an editorial in high school that had all the depth of an average college admissions essay yet somehow provoked a New York publisher to contact him about writing a memoir before he even turned eighteen, so maybe her brother was a veela.) That conviction of superiority, which cannot be fully supported, is the heart of the novel, and the point of it, to be fair, but it's insufficiently sold. I never bought that the Brants were exceptional, or even very charismatic or likable, so there was no fall from grace or catharsis in the revelation that they weren't.
And that revelation needs to hit, because Luisa's eventual epiphany--that we are all people of our time--is too obvious to carry much weight if there isn't a personal element.
Despite that, there are cool things here, even if all of them are best appreciated intellectually rather than emotionally. Lippman is very smart about the way both personal histories and histories of record are often made out of lies and omissions, and very attentive to the way one generation's virtues can be the next's horrified discoveries. That does eventually make the novel into something compelling, and--probably owing somewhat to Lippman's journalistic background, and points to her for that--something far more reminiscent of true crime than of literary suspense. It feels like unearthing history.
The ultimate result is a novel that is frustrating in its unevenness--complex, but far too lukewarm for greatness.
Wilde Lake has not resolved my feelings in one direction or the other. It's a deep, compellingly fractal look at memory and information that is damaged by the fact that none of the characters seem deeply involved, at any time, with anything, and that it is utterly insistent on letting you know that it's a To Kill a Mockingbird homage.
Some of the latter is nicely done, like the beginning which looks at the circumstances in which Luisa's brother Jem--I mean, AJ--got his arm broken--but much of it is clumsily inserted (the obligatory scene where Luisa insults a lower-class boy's table manners and is reprimanded for it) and some of it is even cringe-inducing (the book is careful not to specify the Brants' housekeeper, "Teensy," as black, but it suggests it very strongly and her characterization is stuck in the fifties). Literary homages of this kind, I think, should remind us that there is an essential grandeur to the business of being human. We ought to be reminded, every now and then, that the petty jostling for power in Congress, or within a rural family, can be Shakespearean; that the social norms of who should text whom, and when, can be just as mannered as any exchange between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. But To Kill a Mockingbird is too close in history to work on those terms, and the only neat effect you get from Lippman using it so much is the resonance with the controversy of Go Set a Watchman--Wilde Lake tries to be both novels, dealing with the child's eye view of complications that only reveal more faults in adulthood, and that is slightly cool. But it still seems like borrowed significance that asks the reader to care about Luisa and her family not because of the importance Lippman has invested in them but because we all know Scout and Atticus; it's fanfic with a couple of degrees of separation, neither fish nor fowl, and it would be better if it weren't.
And maybe if it weren't, the novel would have to work a little harder to develop its characters and make their motivations and moralities distinct. As it is, everyone here is sort of low-grade unpleasant while being firmly convinced of their own superiority, which makes for a monotonous emotional palette. Luisa Brant praises her brother for having a midlife crisis that was actually original, for example, but since that crisis involved quitting his job, growing a ponytail, and divorcing his wife for a younger yoga instructor, I'm at a loss as to which part of this, exactly, is supposed to surprise me. (Then again, her brother also wrote an editorial in high school that had all the depth of an average college admissions essay yet somehow provoked a New York publisher to contact him about writing a memoir before he even turned eighteen, so maybe her brother was a veela.) That conviction of superiority, which cannot be fully supported, is the heart of the novel, and the point of it, to be fair, but it's insufficiently sold. I never bought that the Brants were exceptional, or even very charismatic or likable, so there was no fall from grace or catharsis in the revelation that they weren't.
And that revelation needs to hit, because Luisa's eventual epiphany--that we are all people of our time--is too obvious to carry much weight if there isn't a personal element.
Despite that, there are cool things here, even if all of them are best appreciated intellectually rather than emotionally. Lippman is very smart about the way both personal histories and histories of record are often made out of lies and omissions, and very attentive to the way one generation's virtues can be the next's horrified discoveries. That does eventually make the novel into something compelling, and--probably owing somewhat to Lippman's journalistic background, and points to her for that--something far more reminiscent of true crime than of literary suspense. It feels like unearthing history.
The ultimate result is a novel that is frustrating in its unevenness--complex, but far too lukewarm for greatness.