She understands, now, why people have children. It is because we fail as ourselves, all of us fail. But we have a secret plan, a subconscious desire within us to become something astonishing, like the caterpillar that unwittingly becomes a butterfly. And, so, knowing that we will fail as ourselves, what we do instead is make something astonishing. We make our children in an effort to remake ourselves.
How a Woman Becomes a Lake begins like a lost woman mystery — a police officer finds an empty car idling with its doors open beside a frozen lake while responding to a woman’s call for help from the nearby payphone — but as author Marjorie Celona is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop who now teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Oregon, this modern “gone girl” trope is used with great intention to explore deeper themes of family dynamics, intergenerational trauma, grief, and loss. On the one hand, I can see that this wouldn’t be the twisty thriller that readers of the (apparent) genre would be looking for, and the sense that the writing is quite calculated and engineered keeps the characters at a bit of a remove, but Celona has a lot of interesting things to say about families, gender-based expectations, and relationships and I won’t fault her (too much) for allowing her craftsmanship to shine through. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
”I will keep your secret,” she whispered.
“Why?”
“Because I think it’s the right thing to do.”
This is essentially a mystery, so I won’t give away the plot, but I do want to note the characters. There are two main women: Vera is the one who is missing in the beginning and she is a successful experimental filmmaker, an assistant professor of cinema, and at thirty, beginning to regret that the man she married isn’t actually the most interesting person in the world. Evelina is recently separated from her abusive husband, and as a single mother caring for two young boys, she longs for the days of freedom in her youth when she was an adventure-loving cook on a fishing boat. As for the men: Leo is the abusive husband, and as fundamentally unlikeable as he is (heavy drinking, quick temper, violent rages with his sons), he knows he should become a better man and notes that at least he isn’t as hard on his boys as his own father had been with him. Lewis is the young and handsome police officer who responds to the initial call and we eventually learn that it was a difficult relationship with his own father that made him want to become a defender of the public. And Denny is the husband of the missing woman — both pitiful in his grief and the focus of the police investigation — and besides knowing that his parents died just before he met Vera (and that they were Russian Orthodox immigrants, his father teaching Denny the goldsmithing trade before Denny decided to move far away from them), and that Denny is an older husband who couldn’t stop himself from drinking too much and oversleeping to Vera’s disgust, Denny is almost here as a foil for the other characters. Jesse and Dmitri are the two boys (10 and 6 at the beginning) and their pain, fear and yearning for love and approval drive the emotional heart of the story.
And I want to note a major motif: It becomes very apparent that mirrors are an important element in Celona’s ideas. Not only was Vera’s Cannes-screened short film named Mirror, but eventually, Evelina notes that the lake from the beginning has at some point been named Mirror Lake. In between these two points — and because I read a digital copy and could easily go back and confirm my suspicions — pretty much every character has a transformative moment of self-recognition while looking at themselves in a mirror. And noting this, I had to wonder if the names “Vera” and “Evalina” were meant to be wonky mirrors of one another (it can’t be a coincidence that both of them are described as being distanced from their parents in a book about parenthood and emotional inheritance), as are “Leo” and “Lewis” (and especially because they were both most pointedly formed by their relationships with their fathers). The presence of mirrors is so prevalent that Celona obviously wants the reader to notice and reflect upon them (har har), and that’s the kind of engineered writing that can make me impatient. On the other hand, and contrary to some of the reviews I have read for this book, I did really like the lyrical disembodied sections; I’m all for noticing lovely language.
The past is not buried. The past is right there, like a coin in a shallow pool, and all she has to do is reach.
And I want to end by talking about the title. In her endnotes, Celona writes that she took it from an essay in The New Yorker from 2018 by Jia Tolentino. The essay talks about rape culture and the patriarchy — from Greek mythology (wherein virtuous women could be transformed into streams or laurel trees but the rapacious gods would yet pursue them) to Susan Brownmiller’s landmark 1975 book Against Our Will (which argued that “a politics of dominance over the earth, the poor, the vulnerable, is fundamentally connected to the belief that women’s bodies are rightfully subjected to men”) to Tolentino’s present in 2018, in which Trump had recently given power to a string of rape-deniers and anti-abortionists — and as abstract as “How a Woman Becomes a Lake” feels as a title for that essay (Tolentino does write of her moment, “It’s been a long time since I’ve felt lake-like — cool and still.”), I really had to meditate on how Celona meant it as a title for this book. There are no rapes here or men dominating helpless women: Evelina was madly in love with Leo, but she found the wherewithal to kick him out before the book begins; Vera was incredibly accomplished and held down by no man (is the sign she taped up in her office — work harder than everyone else, but never feel like you’re working — meant to signal how this “workaholic” succeeds in a man’s world?). If anything, it’s the men (and boys) in this story who are burdened by the weight of the patriarchy as passed down by their fathers, and that might be Celona’s point, but I am left still confused about the title. (In the essay, Tolentino describes some of the artwork at an exhibition she attended — in which women artists exposed rape as an unheroic act in counterpoint to classical themes — and she writes, “What we do to ourselves in order to weather trauma often feels similarly abstract, silent: a patch of skin becoming bark-like, a former softness growing spikes.” And that feels closer to Celona’s themes than what is evoked by “a woman becoming a lake”; I’m still pondering her meaning.)
This is hard to evaluate as a straight story — the plot takes some quirky turns, and like others have written, the ending is a bit underwhelming — but there is much to learn from the characters and their backstories and their development. I do admire Celona’s craft, wish it wasn’t quite so visible, and appreciate that she’s given me so much to think about; more to love than merely like.
