It was Ron Charles’ review in his Substack that made me think this was a book I would enjoy and that turned out to be true. This was just the read for me.
It begins in suburban Rochester, New York in 1977 when we meet two upper middle class families each with two teenage kids living across the street from each other. There’s Mr. Finnegan (Finn), and Honey, who quite dislikes sex, Dune, who loves Clara Larkin, and Fern. Finn successfully runs the family grocery store chain. Across the street are the Larkins, Sam who has a high level position in Xerox and prefers sex with men, Nina, who loves to cook and write about food, Clara, who loves Dune, and Bridie, who is devoted to her older sister. Finn and Nina have an affair and then take off in the middle of the night long enough to get divorces and marry each other. The book recounts how shattering this was and how it affects each of them, first immediately and then in sections dated 1994-95 and 1998.
I loved reading the stories of the people in these families over this span of years; I found that very satisfying. The author loves her characters enough to give even the less appealing ones some understanding.
I doubt that people other than immediate family members would have been so completely shocked by a divorce as this community was in 1977 and affairs are rarely a surprise to everyone. But there were aspects of those years mentioned by the author that brought me back to that time and I want to remember those.
Several times Sam expressed concern that Xerox was not attending to the ground-breaking work that Xerox PARC was doing in Palo Alto. Of course he was right and when Steve Jobs heard a presentation given by that organization, he was shocked they were not exploiting that gold mine (see Walter Isaacson’s description of this). I loved that the author gave this factual information to her fictional character.
I was impressed that when Finn had a heart attack, he had a near-death experience with the classic observations. He saw his long-dead mother and his daughter Fern and he called out for his daughter and chose to be with her. And true to the view at the time, his doctors explained it as a lack of blood flow to his brain. Now there is a much greater body of knowledge about these experiences. And as a result of his heart attack, Finn realized his marriage to Honey was a mistake.
When Sam was on his own and no longer worked for Xerox, he moved to San Francisco just as the AIDS epidemic was beginning. Because his daughters were concerned for his safety, they spoke to him about the need for being careful and that was when he was forced to acknowledge to them his sexual interest in men.
Fern became a nurse and when she chose hospice work, her mother Honey didn’t understand why she would choose such depressing work, rather than working with babies. Fern’s knowledge and skills came to the fore at the end of the book.
All the characters have their moments in the spotlight and I found them all to be of interest.
Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, Lake Effect, Ecco (HarperCollins), 2026, 273 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.