The Divorce Revolution Comes to Suburbia

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s "Lake Effect" traces the upheaval — and the joy — after two marriages fall apart.

The Tuesday Review

(Ecco)

Great domestic novelists, like Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Strout, routinely create such witty and poignant worlds that readers risk growing accustomed to their genius. It’s an irritating critical response endured, I suspect, more by women writers than by men. Succeed long enough in the realm of family fiction, and the raves curdle into weary familiarity, embroidered with condescension.

But to capture the full panoply of an ordinary household is no easier than cultivating one of those supposedly carefree gardens that explode every spring in a riot of waxy colors — a choreography of nature that requires years of labor, taste, and skill.

I was conscious of resisting that lazy bias as I began Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s new novel, “Lake Effect,” which drives confidently into the placid suburbs of American letters — roof down, air conditioner blasting. The first chapter could not be more unassuming, or more daringly innocuous.

In 1977, the Finnegans and the Larkins, longtime friends in Rochester, N.Y., are pushing their marriages along like they’re mowing the lawn for the millionth time. One husband works for his dad’s grocery business; the other for Xerox — jobs considered so secure they might as well be endowed chairs. Their wives are mothers first and forever. Honey Finnegan is a stridently pious woman determined to banish sugar, make way for Jesus, and bring down her daughter’s weight. Nina Larkin writes a monthly food column for a local newspaper but would never consider it a career. From across the street, these lives look as smooth and sweet as a sheet of fondant icing.

At a dinner party early in the novel, Nina is trying to bring the evening to a close when the conversation turns to a remarkable technological development: “Xerox is going to start giving out personal computers like candy,” Sam Larkin says.

Honey’s not impressed. Everything’s moving too fast these days. “One wrong message sent out into the universe and that’s it!” she warns. “Nuclear mayhem.”

But Nina reassures her there’s nothing to worry about: “The computers have something called a universal undo.... If you make a mistake or change your mind, you can undo it in a second.”

The irony swells so large that it’s hard to believe there’s space in the dining room for all the guests. And soon there isn’t.

After dinner, when Nina is briefly alone with Honey’s husband in the kitchen, they start fantasizing about the universal undo. Imagine, they wonder, if their dutiful, sexless marriages could somehow be reversed. Why, in their early 50s, should they never again enjoy the thrill of intimacy? Finn Finnegan thinks, “Hovering over the mother of your children trying to have an orgasm while that person literally braced herself against the onslaught was almost worse than nothing.”

I asked Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney about the cultural shift behind Lake Effect — and whether we might be living through something similar today.

One of the great pleasures of “Lake Effect” is how deftly it salvages the world of the late 1970s. Here, the almost-forgotten details and attitudes of that bell-bottomed era are revived in living color. Except, of course, for the shocking illustrations in The Joy of Sex, whose disconcertingly hairy models appear in stark black-and-white. Nina’s elder daughter, who purloins a copy of the forbidden book, thinks the short, squat model looks “disturbingly like an apostle from one of her childhood Bible stories.”

Sweeney, now in her mid-60s, has recreated that epochal moment when suburban conformity shifted and then cracked. Neighbors are whispering about the Kinsey Report. The news weeklies — remember when people read those? — note with alarm that the institution of marriage is collapsing. It must be the pill or feminism or fluoride. Suddenly, spending the rest of one’s life in an unsatisfying relationship blessed by God doesn’t feel like a sacrament; it feels like a waste.

And so, flush with lust and hope — and intoxicated with a new sense of freedom sweeping the nation — Nina Larkin and Finn Finnegan grab their chance at happiness. The families are shattered, but the families remain.

This is basically Anne Tyler with better sex.

In the brisk second half of Lake Effect, as Sweeney moves through the years, she gently cradles each of these characters and their halting efforts to adjust to a change they never imagined possible.

There is an authorial kindness here that’s endearing. Some of these characters who initially considered themselves victims of Nina and Finn’s selfishness come to find a freedom they never thought possible. And even the most ridiculous ones are eventually humanized. Their comic foibles and cruelties aren’t forgotten, but they’re subsumed in the larger catalogue of experience that absolves much.

What remains, though, and becomes the focus of Lake Effect, is one daughter’s irreconcilable anger about the family upheaval wrought by her mother’s decision way back in 1977. In Sweeney’s hands, this becomes a profound consideration of anger, the kind that strikes deep and warps a person’s spine. What is it like, she wonders, to live in that crouch of resentment, to cling to a hurt so long that it becomes a necessary crutch?

Another novelist might not have had the courage to take this story right up to the lip of sentimentality or the skill to avoid falling down that hole. But Sweeney carries off something immensely difficult and heartening — a braiding of hurt and forgiveness, sadness and love, that feels strong enough to last.◆

Lake Effect, by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney (Ecco, 288 pp., $30)

---

---

Last week’s review: All in the Family Complex
A new novel from National Book Award finalist Karan Mahajan traps generations inside a Delhi compound where resentment and ambition thrive.