It’s both appalling
and completely understandable that it took until this year for one of Laura
Lippman’s brilliant mystery novels Lady of The Lake to get a TV
adaptation. Appalling because Lippman has been one of the best selling
novelists of the last quarter of a century and understandable when you learn
that until fairly recently she was married to David Simon, arguably the
greatest single showrunner in TV history. Anyone who has followed Simon’s work
(and Lippman makes reference to it in quite a few of her novels) knows that the
lion’s share of his TV shows, from Homicide, The Wire and We Own This
City have been set in Baltimore. And the majority of Lippman’s work, Lady
of the Lake among them, is set in Charm City as well. Perhaps it wasn’t a
coincidence that Simon’s employment with HBO was terminated not long after Lady
of the Lake debuted on Apple: I can just imagine how many executives have
rejected Lippman’s work because they don’t want to a Baltimore set mystery.
Lippman is, like many
mystery writers, an author of both her own mystery series and stand-alone
novels. The former involve Tess Monaghan, a former reporter with a defunct
Baltimore newspaper who becomes a private investigator and begins to
investigates crimes that involve the often corrupt nature of her home city. To
date I’ve read three and they are compact, literate and involve the corrupt
nature of Baltimore and Monaghan’s complicated family, which involves a mixture
of Irish, Judaism and feminism.
Her standalone novels
are closer to noir and have a frequently historical tone: Life Sentences involves
a nonfiction writer investigating a mystery that involves the murder of a baby
going back decades and finds a deeper story linking to both race and her own
family history. Sunburn tells the story of two strangers who begin a one
night stand and their affair ends up relating to a series of deaths. Dream
Girl her most recent novel, involves an aged author who is undergoing
memory loss and doesn’t know if the nurse he’s trapped with might be a killer. All
of these novels are both short and incredible reads at the same time.
The novel that’s
fascinating me is one she wrote in 2022 Prom Mom. The novel is about
Amber Glass who the title refers to. As you might expect she went to her prom
pregnant, gave birth in the hotel afterwards and her baby was found dead. Amber
denied her responsibility but no one believed her she was sentenced to a juvie
facility and her future was compromised. She moved out of Baltimore and has
spent her entire adult life in New Orleans.
When her stepfather
dies she returns to Baltimore to settle his estate and claim her inheritance.
She’s in real estate and when she drives she sees space for a commercial
gallery and she decides, almost impulsively to rent it. When she tries to
convince one of her few friends that this is a sign she tells her bluntly: “You
can’t go home again, Amber…I’m surprised you want too.”
In a sense Amber
knows why she’s doing it within a few minutes the moment she decides to google
Joe Simpson the man who got her pregnant and who was blamed for it.
The novel follows
Amber, Joe and his wife Meredith. It starts in the winter of 2019, starts with
the early onset of the pandemic and deals with the 2020 election and the
aftermath, though it is not the direct subject of the novel. I should mention
that none of the major characters develop symptoms, nor do they even know
anyone who dies from the disease. Indeed, what is the most bizarre thing about
the novel is that not only Amber and Meredith end up enjoying COVID far more
than they have any right and in a way seem resentful when the vaccines come.
The novel is
essentially about Joe and the three women who have certain levels of obsession
with him. What’s the most remarkable thing about Prom Mom is that even
before the action has truly begun the reader really wonders why any of these
women find anything remarkable or even interesting about Joe, who comes across every
time the perspective comes to him as the definition of the weakest and most
unremarkable person imaginable. The irony is that Amber’s potential was snuffed
out because of what happened to her and Joe truly believes the same thing
happened to him when it fact he never seems like the kind of man who had any
ability for anything other than to be unremarkable but truly believes he was
exceptional.
Joe has spent his
entire life, from his teenage years on, always chasing something better. He was
failing French in high school when Amber agreed to tutor him. At the time his
girlfriend Kaitlyn broke up with him and Amber, who came from the wrong side of
the tracks, had a crush on him. The two
began a relationship which Amber believed was out of mutual desire but was more
likely because Joe just wanted to have sex. Amber wanted to go to the prom and
Joe didn’t want to go but he agreed to take her. He actually left her during
the prom to hook up with Kaitlyn.
Amber didn’t know she
was pregnant at the time, something neither the press nor the police believed.
As we learn this happened because her own mother got pregnant with her as a teenager
by a much older man who promptly left her and her mother not only never loved
her but barely paid attention to her. When she got married to Amber’s stepfather
who may have been the only man who cared for her, she refused to let him take
his name and didn’t believe her daughter as a matter of course. Amber no doubt
left Baltimore as much to get away from her mother as the tabloid headlines.
Joe’s mother, by
contrast, worshipped and never considered Amber good enough for her. As we see
in a flashback and other scenes in the present, Mrs. Simpson never thought any
woman her oldest son dated was good enough for him or indeed any of the women
her other children ended up marrying. From what we see of her Mrs. Simpson is a
piece of work, always nagging at Joe and his wife, always looking down on anybody
who gets in the way of her family’s plans. Even during the height of the virus
she insists that this not stand in the way of the Christmas party and she
waffles on the idea of it even being outside.
Joe is devoted to
Meredith and doesn’t want to do anything to hurt her. He’s basically done
everything she’s wanted to do he never wanted to have children, when he met her
in Houston and she wanted to go back to John Hopkins he followed her even
though he never wanted to go back to Baltimore, he went to work for his uncle
who he doesn’t like but who very well may be the only person who was willing to
hire him. Joe has no capability to recognize the changing time and may only be
decent at his job in commercial real estate. In an effort to prove himself and
impress his uncle he decides to buy a shopping mall which he intends to flip
when it becomes a success. Critically he makes the purchase in February of
2020.
During this same
period Joe has begun having an affair with a real estate agent named Jordan
Altman. He’s made it clear that this is a temporary thing and that he has no
intention of leaving Meredith for her. Jordan, however, has apparently decided
that she is not going to take no for an answer – if Joe was willing to give it,
which he keeps refusing to do because he’s such a nice guy. He can’t even bring
himself to break up with her directly and tells her he and Meredith are trying
to have a baby together which he thinks will satisfy her. It doesn’t. She ends
up going to Meredith’s office to speak with her and comes very close to blowing
the whole secret.
We never see the
novel from Jordan’s perspective so we never know why she thinks she deserves to
have Joe or why she starts taking actions to not only blow up his life but destroy
him. The closest we get comes when she goes to see Meredith, ostensibly for a
consultation. “I want to be the best at everything,” she tells Meredith. “Because
I like to win.” She can’t even come up with a reason why; she clearly considers
Joe a prize and refuses to acknowledge even as she does everything to destroy
so much of the order of things, why she’s doing this.
Meredith would seem
to be the victim here but on closer inspection, she may be the biggest monster
in the novel. She doesn’t like Joe’s family, she has a book club but she doesn’t
like the people there, she considers herself a good person because she does
plastic surgery on the downtrodden but that’s just a way she sees herself. She
suffered breast cancer that nearly killed her at nineteen and that’s when she
and Joe found each other. She is as devoted to Joe as he is to her…but she
doesn’t like anyone else.
Meredith is a model
of the good liberal person but the more we see her the more we see that she’s
the definition of not only a narcissist but a racist and a borderline sexist as
well. When her friends tell her late in the pandemic that they’re getting
divorced because of the lockdown she makes it clear that she considers divorce
a moral weakness and on the woman’s part more than the man’s. She bought a big
house that is too large for her but she has no desire to move into something
smaller. At one point in the novel she truly believes she has COVID and uses
that to seclude herself. However, much later in the novel when she discusses it
with her mother, her mother tells her that she wants to believe you had it: “You
hate being sick but you hate being ordinary more.”
Meredith’s parents,
we learn early in the novel, are both alcoholics – liver specialists ironically
- and Meredith’s experience being raised
by them contributed to her never wanting to have children. In the latter half of
the novel Meredith’s grandmother tells her that her parents loved each other
once but that her being born destroyed their marriage. It says much about
Meredith that she believes that raising a child may have destroyed them, rather
than the very real possibility raising her was the problem; in the final
pages we get a very clear picture as to just why Meredith is who she was and
why she and Joe may be perfectly matched.
Amber decides to
friend Joe on Facebook and Joe ends up seeing her later to buy Christmas gift
for Jordan because he doesn’t want to hurt her feelings before Christmas. They end
up getting closer and then the lockdown happens. Joe is the kind of person who
has high energy and can’t stand being cooped up. He needs to get out and be
with people. He goes to see Amber in an open place and…well, I think you can guess
what happens next.
Amber, it’s worth
noting, comes to her senses about what this is quicker than Joe does, because
after awhile Joe’s life keeps interfering. It’s telling that what Joe isn’t
worried about Meredith discovering is his affair with Amber or even Jordan but
the financial difficulties he’s in and the multiple frauds he kept committing
in order to keep his head above water. Joe keeps telling himself he’s such a
nice guy that he doesn’t want to tell Meredith in order to upset her. And this
is the time Jordan decides that she wants Joe back.
It's telling that as
the novel progresses Joe is both unable to make a decision about what to do and
keeps telling himself he’s a good person. Joe is the kind of guy who gets mixed
up in James Cain’s novels but unlike so many of those characters Joe can’t even
be bothered to make the hard choices and wants Amber to do it for him. Even
then his solution is so weak and piecemeal – he doesn’t want to really hurt
anybody.
This novel is both
incredibly thrilling and quietly satiric, particularly in the way it describes
both Joe and Meredith. Joe is the kind of guy who refuses to make up his mind
about anything and even when the 2020 election comes around just can’t decide
who he wants to vote for. (The joke of course is he’s voting in Maryland, which
means it won’t make a difference if he were to vote for Trump.) Amber can never
bring herself to ask if he voted for Trump, but when they meet after January 6th
and he says: “You have to understand people are angry”, it unnerves her in a
way nothing else has. There’s also the fact that Meredith and Amber are kind of
unwilling to leave the bubble they’ve been in during COVID for different
reasons and while have moments of guilt when they think so – people are dying
after all and they’ve just been inconvenienced - they seem unbothered by what’s actually
happening around them. The sad part everything that happened – including the
inevitable death, though I won’t say who dies – would never have happened
except under these circumstances.
By the end of Prom
Mom we learn the truth about what happened the night at the prom and who
Joe really was all this time. And despite what you learn about what happened
and to who Amber still emerged with the one with the clearest moral compass not
only about who she was but what she spent her life avoiding. And there is, in a
real sense, the kind of happy ending you rarely get in a noir as everybody gets
exactly what they deserve.
I haven’t seen Lady
in the Lake yet and I may not unless it starts getting award considerations
later on. But I hope that it leads to adaptations of other works by Lippman for
television. Considering that Will Trent just got his own TV series, I’d say its
high time for Tess Monaghan. And so many of Lippman’s other novels lend
themselves to the limited series treatment, including Prom Mom. Having
just seen The Penguin I think I could easily see Kristin Miloti playing
Amber Glass. She certainly has that killer instinct.
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