The Story of the Lake
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
At the turn of the century, Nogowogotoc Lake was considered the Newport of the Midwest, where some of the most affluent families from Milwaukee and Chicago spent their summers in luxurious "cottages" at the water's edge. The Story of the Lake weaves the tale of four of these families over the course of generations. With each decade another net of history, prejudice, love and intrigue is cast over the surface of the water, creating a more and more intricate pattern.
Joseph Ulrich of Kreuser Beer and his rival, "Pork Packing Prince" Walter Schraeger vie for the hand of Alicia Bosquet, flamboyant newcomer to the scene. Isabella Wells, the reclusive heiress to Milwaukee's finest department store, becomes dangerously involved with Margaret Sanger's early Planned Parenthood crusade, while her sister, Helen, tries to protest the end of Prohibition, a force too great to contend with in the beer loving city of Milwaukee.
This often dark and disturbing American drama is full of gusts of lake air, filling the senses with images and traditions that have mostly slipped away. A personal retelling of family secrets as well as a reflection of the times, The Story of the Lake, is the big passionate family saga that finally gives the Midwest its due.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This sweeping American saga follows the destinies of four wealthy Midwestern families (the Hewitts, Welleses, Ulrichs and Schraegers) who spend their summers at fictional Nogowogotic Lake in Wisconsin. The story opens at the turn of the century as 14-year-old Isabelle Merrick is washing a statue in a garden of ``larkspur, dahlias, roses, phlox'' when a dog appears with a half-dead capon in its jaws--an apt metaphor for the intrusion, during the next several decades, of some of life's ugliness into the beauty-filled existences of these founders and heirs of beer, dairy and department-store fortunes. As the tides of the Depression, Prohibition and the two world wars wash over the well-wrought characters, violence, suicide, fatal illness and changing financial prospects punctuate their lives--as does Isabelle's plunge into the suffragette movement. Still, the natural glories of the lake, and the value of family life, endure. Chester's supple prose and eye for sensuous period detail capture well the rhythms of life and death at the lake, and while some may find the privileged self-absorption of her characters a bit cloying, she makes it clear through their joys and sufferings that, contrary to Fitzgerald, the rich aren't different from you and me--and are worthy of the attention and compassion that she lavishes on them in this fine novel.
