How a Woman Becomes a Lake by Marjorie Celona

How a Woman Becomes a Lake by Marjorie Celona

Hamish Hamilton, March 2020

Audiobook (7 hours; Penguin) read by Laurel Lefkow

The premise and puzzle of this story is a woman who goes missing on New Year's Day in 1986. The issues raised include parenting after divorce, alcohol addiction, mental health, and dealing with the unintended consequences of our actions.

It takes place in Whale Bay, a small fishing town on the West Coast, "a stone's throw from Canada."

        People thought frozen lakes were stable, and they walked out onto them. People did this sort of thing all the time. They drove snowmobiles and trucks onto lakes! Lewis had done this as a boy every winter, in his father's red pickup truck, on Lake Mendota. Even there, two or three people fell in every year, fishermen mostly, their bodies pulled out -- sometimes alive, sometimes not -- covered in icicles. That was the trouble with frozen lakes. There was no way to tell the thickness of the ice, nor the depth of the water beneath.

The narrative unrolls in shifting third-person perspectives: 

• Vera is the missing woman; her voice comes from beyond death.
• Denny, an alcoholic jewelry designer, was Vera's husband. He's arthritic and severely depressed.
• Hot-tempered Leo, flaky and ill-equipped for parenting, is also an alcoholic. His wife Evelina had enough of his violence and kicked him out. 
• Evelina is fiercely protective of her two children, worrying about them when they spend time with their father. She is addicted to lottery scratch cards.
• Ten-year-old Jesse and his little brother Dmitri are Evelina and Leo's boys. 
• Lewis Cote is the young police officer who took a call from Vera about finding a lost boy. That's the last anyone heard from her. Lewis is new in town and lonely.

Loneliness pervades this novel. Both Denny and Evelina have let their friendships lapse after marriage, leaving them with nobody to turn to for support when their spouses are no longer in their lives.

        They trudged back up the hill, and Denny watched the policeman drive off. And then he and Scout went back into the silent, empty house. He looked at the ceiling. He looked out the window.

        Who did he have left? Who was there to talk to? Who could he tell about his day if Vera never returned? What he wanted to do was tell Vera about all of this. "Vera! Vera, you'll never guess what happened!" he wanted to say. "You disappeared!"

Lewis, the police officer, feels an emotional connection to Jesse:

        He couldn't tell whether Jesse was okay or not. There was an intensity to him that Lewis hadn't seen in a child before. It reminded him of his own childhood, the constant tension in his shoulders, the way he felt that if someone bumped into him, he would shatter.

The sections with Vera's viewpoint from the afterlife didn't work for me. It's not that I object to a ghost's perspective per se. Sometimes it's a perfect way to provide a wider scope. In this case, however, I found those parts sentimental and message-y.

        No one tells her to do anything, but she knows that what she is meant to do is float. To stop dipping back down to the surface of the earth. To stop caring. [...]

        It's okay, Denny. I am up here. I am up here. We did the best we could. We loved each other so deeply at first. Think of that. Think of how hard we laughed. She feels the absence of her own eyes and her own tears, and the absence of her own mouth and her own voice, and the absence of her own arms and the absence of the warmth of another person's arms around her.

While the majority of the novel takes place over the course of 1986, the final chapter leaps ahead to 2020, wrapping everything up neatly. Too neatly.

Giller chances: MEDIUM-LOW - The title of the book is great (Celona credits Jia Tolentino for the line), the rotating viewpoints make for in-depth characterization, and the puzzle of Vera's death is interesting. Vera's ghost hits a sour note and I have reservations regarding the denouement (left vague here for spoiler reasons).

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.