“Lake People” Does Not Escape Convolution

“I like to think my birth parents believed that this lake would hold me, keep me safe, but I don’t see how that could possibly be true, for it turns out I come from a long line of people swallowed by these waters,” says the protagonist, Alice, in Abi Maxwell’s debut novel. Despite its clichéd premise of the search for love—in this case found in the backwoods of the New Hampshire Lakes region—“Lake People” promises to be so much more at its start. In the first chapters, the novel alludes to stories of families broken and united, of intermingled lives and unwritten histories, all centered around the mystical power of the titular lake. Yet perhaps such a mission was too much for Maxwell: rather than coming off as an interwoven work that threads together the lives of generations of Lake People through one girl’s search for love and her past, it reads as disjointed to the point of losing its intrigue and leaving the prose puzzling rather than compelling.

Set in rural New England over the span of six generations, “Lake People” examines abandoned child Alice’s life on the lake as she searches for a love she can never seem to find. Structurally, the split sections of past, present, and future vary enormously in coherency. Maxwell does a wonderful job in setting up Alice’s “Lake People”  past that begins with her Swedish great-great-grandmother, Eleanora. Maxwell beautifully weaves the tale of Eleanora’s time on the island in the middle of the lake—as well as the stories of Eleanora’s children and grandchildren—in a surreal, almost Beowulf-esque mythical style that presents not only the inexplicable draw and power of the lake over the lives of Eleanora and her descendants but also the chain of effects in Eleanora’s line that will—the reader hopes—play out in Alice’s life.

In the progression to part two, “History became legend. Legend became myth. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost,” to appropriately quote J. R. R. Tolkien. In a similar manner, Maxwell fails to fulfill the expectations that she promised in part one. The lake is almost completely forgotten at this point. The stories presented in part one that seemed relevant turn out to have been small interludes in a family history that seems to be going nowhere fast. The heart-wrenching anecdote of Signe—Alice’s great-great aunt who could never come out to herself as gay, let alone to her family, and was lost in the lake—remains only an anecdote with hardly any relevance to the work as a whole. Instead, Maxwell turns to the topic of class struggle, as Alice is the illegitimate child of Eleanora’s line and the Hills, the ultimate underclass of New England society. When Alice finally meets her grandmother Sophie, Alice does not focus on the titular Lake People; rather, she reflects on her other, poorer line of ancestry: “Hill hands… the same long, straight thumbs, too, and the same blunt nails that will never be shaped into something delicate and beautiful, as Sophie’s are.”

The rapid changes in point of view and temporal setting in parts two and three are also too confusing to appreciate their craft. The action begins with the funeral of Signe and transitions to Sophie and Alice’s lives. Signe leaves the property on Eleanora’s island for Alice, Signe’s only real tie back to the lake that was so prevalent in the opening of the book. The changes in narration from limited omniscient to first person vary chapter by chapter, are not consistent in any means, and function to further obscure the progress of the novel rather than to elucidate points, connections and the characters’ feelings. Whereas such a strategy works in “The Yellow Birds” by Kevin Powers, as the fractured nature of the narrative reflects the fracturing effect of war, here it only seems to obfuscate Maxwell’s original goals.

The lake’s lack of influence, though, is the most striking disappointment following the promise of the novel’s beginning. After its powerful description at the beginning of the novel, in which it takes the lives of Eleanora’s children yet is also strangely loved by her and the other inhabitants of the island, the latter portions of the book are largely devoid of any such active and strong descriptions of the lake and its influences.

However, Maxwell partially redeems the book in the end, when Alice finally undergoes some type of catharsis in the lake. While Maxwell used more active imagery of Ida, Eleanora’s daughter, suddenly sinking into the lake—only to be replaced by a series of rock formations and a bear, killed by the lake’s rocks, on the exact spot of Ida’s death—Alice’s baptism is quiet, short, and not fully described. The reader knows all Alice knows, and with sufficient mysticism Alice tells us later, “I do not know what became of me in that water.” However, in the end, Alice’s life returns to the idyll represented by Eleanora in the beginning—not in the lap of luxury, to be sure, but calm and happy. Alice is finally united with the man who fills the void she’s felt through the whole novel. In this, Maxwell manages to somehow salvage the fraying threads of the middle of the book and tie them into an ending somewhat consistent with the promises made in the beginning.

Though Maxwell does manage to convince both the reader and Alice of the power in the lake, the loss of compelling storyline and coherency as the book progress disappoint in a debut novel with so much potential. Simply, it does not have a forward push, a driving factor to take it from its mystical beginnings to its realistic end. The death of Signe and her siblings certainly pull the heartstrings, but it is hard to empathize with Alice as she muddles her way through her life in the middle in an emotionless and confusing manner. The opening is beautiful, promising, and the ending is synthesized wonderfully. But the void that is the middle lacks a reason to even put in the effort of wading through.