Author's Note: I did
mean to get this review up in time for February but as my readers know I've
been dealing with a lot of other things and February is the shortest
month. As apologies consider this a review for February 31st and
that there will be one for March down the road.
By the time I finished reading Wilde Lake
another in the seemingly endless line of brilliant novels by Laura Lippman I
found myself pondering two questions, one of which is purely my personal
belief, the other that Lippman never states directly but one might get from
reading it. Both might add a certain explanation to the behavior of Lu Brant,
the protagonist of her novel, but Lippman is too good a writer to imply that
even if my readings were correct it would excuse her actions at any
point in the story.
The first comes from my personal perspective: is
it possible Lu suffers from kind of spectrum disorder? By the time the novel's over we know that
there are disposition to mental instability in her family and Lu herself has
several problems with learning both as a child and in her adult life.
Both as a child and to an extent as an adult Lu
has a way of hearing what people say in a very literal fashion and being unable
to make very clear personal observation. While part of this is due to her
sheltered upbringing and her childhood (which takes place mostly in the 1970s)
it is clear even as she gets older she can't make connections that to the
reader are in front of her face, even with the course of time. She's unable to
get through the idea of a double entendre, even at an age she should be able to,
has no perception of the abusive terms that people say all around her and has a
tendency to take everything a person says to her at face value without
question. She has a great intellectual capacity at a ridiculously young age but
she can't make personal connections and never seems able to comprehend at any
age why being intellectually superior is something to be ashamed of. The whole reason she tells the story of her
much older brothers teenage circle is because she has no friends of her own. The one that she makes of her own age she
isolates almost immediately when she invites him into her world because she
can't comprehend why it’s a bad thing to call him white trash in front of her
father.
She says that she managed to crack the popularity
circuit when she was in high school but we see no close friends in adulthood,
even among the people with whom she works at the Howard County States
Attorney's Office where at the start of the novel she has just been elected the
first female one in the county's history. We see how ruthlessly she treats the
people who have helped her, running against him which sets up the driving
action of much of what follows. She claims to love her children but she's made
it very clear her career comes first and we barely see any interactions with
them. The only sexual relationship she has in her life is transactional because
she doesn't want to have a romantic one and she finds this is a way to scratch
an itch. Tellingly it's with one of the friends in her brother's former circle,
whose also married. Lu is a widow but she makes it clear she was considering
having an affair with him even while she was still married. The fact that this
could very well have destroyed her political ambitions is something she
considers but only so that she doesn't when she's running for office. She goes
right back to it after she wins.
And she has a complete sense of tone-deafness. We
see her attend a luncheon where she is the keynote speaker and she's annoyed
that she's a fallback choice. The people wanted the state's attorney for
Baltimore, who is younger and African-American whose win Lu thinks overshadowed
her victory in Howard County. The fact that she is the first female state's
attorney in Howard County history seems more significant in her mind then the
fact than the fact that someone got further then her in what is Maryland's most
populous city. And when she meets a woman who is younger and more threadbare
and calls her out on being richer, she doesn't know how to answer when the
woman makes it clear that she her earrings cost more than she makes in a week –
something she knows is true but that's she unequipped to answer, instead giving
her conventional one and then running away before the woman continues to
challenge her on the fact that she thinks Lu Brant is a woman who is flaunting
her privilege.
The thing is Lu Brant can't comprehend why being
wealthy is a bad thing. Which brings me to the other implication: is Lu Brant in
her heart a conservative who decides to run as a Democrat because that's what's
necessary to advance politically in Howard County? I think I might get less
pushback on that considering how Brant seems to openly present herself.
Throughout the novel she makes it clear that she
is purely a political animal and when she runs against her former boss that meant
as a Democrat. But she has views that throughout make one thing she is only
liberal in the sense that helps her politically. It's not just her provincial
views on where she came from which was from wealth and privilege where she has
little interaction with African-Americans, clearly thinks herself superior to
women – but has no problem going to an all-female school so that her intellect
will put her above them later on – and throughout the entire book she takes a
look at the past that has a clear nostalgia that we all know from conservatism.
She keeps talking about how we should stop holding figures from the past for
having views that were horrible today, which while I agree with it in
principle, we eventually realize is a complete self-serving view.
This becomes the most clear when she's talking
about her past:
In my lifetime -from 1970 to now – the accepted
terms for black people keep evolving. Negro. Black. African-American and now
politicians such as myself are trying to learn the minefields of
gender-identity issues. Not that long ago, two prostitutes from Baltimore stole
car, drove into the National Security Agency campus, got shot, one of them
fatally….They were trans women. "Had they had the surgery?" my father
asked and I tried to explain the question is no longer allowed. "Then
they're transvestites. "No, dad, no." I tried to explain 'trans' and
'cis' which, it turns out, I didn't completely understand myself."
The events in Wilde Lake take place in
April of 2015 as Brant points out not long after Freddie Gray's death would
cause Baltimore to burn.
But Howard County is not Baltimore. Or Ferguson
or North Carolina or Cleveland or – you get the point.
This is not the first time and far from the last
where its clear that Brant is narrating the events of the 1970s and 1980s with
something close to nostalgia. She keeps talking about a series of events which
her family was involved it that would eventually lead to the death of a young
man. And over and over she keeps coming back to the phrase: "They were men
of their times. How can I fault them?"
Wilde Lake was published in 2016. I can't help but think Lu Brant is the kind
of woman who would say in public she was in favor of Obama but in private vote
for McCain and Romney. I suspect that for all her talk of Hilary breaking the
glass ceiling she very well might have voted in the Republican primary. Not for
Trump of course, but I can imagine Howard County is one of the few place in
Maryland where he would have done well and you have to figure she might have
voted for Cruz or Rubio in the primary.
While I think both of these are interesting
possibilities and I wonder if Lippman considered them while writing Wilde
Lake I found myself riveted because this is yet another in a long line of
extraordinary novels by the author where the narration comes from a female
protagonist who fits the mold of not only being unlikable and arrogant but
proud of that arrogance. That arrogance comes from a sense of intelligence or
class that has nothing to do with the real world. I've seen in many characters
such as Cynthia Barnes in Every Secret Thing, Heloise Lewis in And
When She Was Good and five years after this novel was published, Meredith
Sampson in Prom Mom. Like Lu Brant, all of these women share
intelligence, enormous wealth and have gotten to a position of great esteem in
society. All of them are nearly completely isolated socially from the rest of
the world and the people they interact the most with are their families, though
they keep most of their secrets about them.
Lu Brant is cut from the exact same cloth as all
of these women. Her father Andrew Jackson Brant is a legend in Howard County,
the most famous states attorney. He has been known for his brilliant legal
record, his figure in Maryland politics and one of the great forces in that
state. The novel proceeds on two distinct narratives: a first person one in
which Lu relates her family's history in the suburb of Columbia, her awareness
around her family and her relations with her brother and his circle of friends.
The other is related in third person but follows Lu not long after she has been
elected the first female states Attorney in Howard County history and the first
case she chooses to prosecute, the murder of a middle-aged woman by a homeless
man who turns out to be Rudy Drysdale. The stories begin to intersect by the
time we reach the final third of the novel but I will remain vague on the
details as to how exactly.
Lu Brant seems to have it all. She was happily
married to a man she considered the love of her life until he died of a heart
attack ten years ago. She has been raising their twins, which were raised by
surrogates, and has moved back into her father's home to take care of them
while she continues to climb the career ladder.
We know that Lu has been trying to live up to the
reputation of both her father and her brother both of whom have a legacy she's
been unable shake, particularly when it comes to legacy and fame. Her father
was (apparently) always outwardly social and her brother is openly gregarious.
Lu has always struggled with social graces and you wonder why she chose a
political position because for all her intelligence she can't master optics. Of
course that's before you consider that this is clearly a decision of hers to
prove she is smarter and better than her father and her brother which is why
she chose to run for office in the first place, against the man who was her
mentor. She is a Democrat and her boss
is a Republican and even with the name of her father, she still barely managed
to win.
Brant has no issues choosing to run against her
boss, even though he was a friend of hers. So she seeks her father's counsel.
She doesn't know but will learn during the course of the novel that her father
has a very long history of cutting off people who disagree with him even if
they are his own family. He will claim that it is for the public good and the
good of the state but considering just how horrible he treats everyone around
him in private and insists on living on a code of manners that the rest of the
world doesn't follow, it becomes increasingly clear that he's living by a code
that is blanketed by his own prejudices. And as the book progresses we will see
that Lu Brant has not only lived her entire life based on that code but that
until she won the office it never even occurred to her to question that it was
anything but stories.
Like so many of Lippman's female protagonists Lu
Brant is remarkably incurious about her past other than her perception of it at
the time. This would seem to have a
disconnect with her job as a prosecutor and her determination as the novel
progresses to get direct answers. But I'm reminded of an old line that
politicians are lawyers and attorneys never ask questions they don't already
know the answers to. Lu seems more than willing to do this as part of her job
but she's never considered to apply to her life and certainly not her past. (In
this she is the opposite of Tess Monoghan, the private investigator and former
journalist who is the center of Lippman's other novels, who is determined to
find the truth at all cost.)
What's striking as we look as Lu's past as she
tells is just how lonely she was. Her mother died giving birth to her (or so she
spends her life believing.) Her father cut off his parents and has done the
same to her mother's parents as well to the point that Lu doesn't know they are
alive until they start calling the house regularly. In order to avoid talking
to them her father changes the phone number of the house. Her father has
devoted his life to his job and basically leaves her to her older brother and
their housekeeper, who is anything but maternal and raises the Brants as
essentially they were guests in their own home – and she treats actual guests
better.
Lu is so unpopular as a child that she basically
gloms on to her older brother's friends as her own, something that none of them
really like or even tolerate. She
understands none of their adult conversations, doesn't understand double
entendres or even seems to understand when she encounters two having sex. Lu
has framed everything that happens with the aura of nostalgia when even the
casual observer realizes she never comprehended the often horrific events going
on around her and has never questioned them after more than thirty years.
It's this strange naivete that fills ever aspect
of Lu's life both in the past and present, which keeps making me wonder about
her possibly being on the spectrum. This is true even with her one personal
attachment. For years she has been having a casual relationship with Bash, one
of her brother's friends from childhood who is also married. We learn she was
considering that affair the year before her husband died and saw no reason to
think twice about it after he did. This is the kind of thing that, had it been
uncovered during her campaign, could have torpedoed it and could just as easily
be a problem once she becomes states attorney. Yet the moment she wins elected
office she goes right back to seeing Bash for their perennial hookups. The fact
that the sex is incredibly rough is also the kind of thing that could hurt her
career but even though she has no desire to make it more serious, she does it
because it fills a need in her life.
We see throughout the book, both in the past and
present that Andrew Brant is not a great man, not even a very good one. The
closer we get to the end of the novel we learn that her father has been
basically lying to her about multiple secrets that could have led to her living
a different life and he feels no remorse or regret about having hid them from
her. By the end of the book we learn that the one case that built his entire
career – the one that started his entire life – was also based on a fundamental
falsehood that his own biases refused to allow him to follow correctly.
I realize that I've spent a lot of time talking
about Lu Brant and her perception of events and really haven't talked much
about the plot that's involved, especially the story that leads to connecting
both the past and the present in a horrible way. I realize that I could do that
but for once I'm going to leave that for the reader to discover on their own.
What I will say is how the events of the past involve the rape and assault of a
woman who is outside the circle of friends that Lu travels in and that Lu has
never once questioned her brother or her father's version of events until the
case of Rudy Drysdale makes it very clear she has too.
I will say that considering the decade that will
follow in the aftermath of the events in this novel, I'm pretty sure Lu Brant isn't
much of a feminist either or inclined to 'believe women'. When she finally
confronts the victim for the first time in thirty years the woman tells the
kind of story that is familiar of all those victims of rape who have somehow
blamed for what happened to them. Lu is no different than those men both in the
past and indeed when she learns the truth in the present. She's still trying to
defend her family, still inclined to believe that the past is the truth even
though by this point several people have died as a result of her childhood.
I should mention one last thing. Near the end of Wilde
Lake Lu Brant reveals that she's writing this down and placing it in the
Howard County Historical Society where it will not be revealed for another
hundred years. She claims that she is doing this to protect the memories of her
children and future generations of Brants. But by this point its clear she's very
much her father's daughter and is determined to shape the narrative so that she
never has telling her children anything that makes her uncomfortable and so she
doesn't have to face the past either.
It's hard not to feel sympathy for Lu Brant by
the end of the book: even she admits that her actions have cost her everything.
Despite that, there's the very real fact that her decision not to question
reality and only believe what she wanted to her entire life as well as her own
ambition has done just as much damage as her family did in the past. You
honestly wonder at the end of Wilde Lake if she's upset that so many
people are dead because of her family or that they all died before she could
finally learn the truth about her past and now she can never get answers.
One of the last paragraphs of the novel that
doesn't quite spoil anything:
I tell the story here so that I may never tell it
again. My childhood was made up of stories and so many of them were false. Is
that because the true stories were unendurable?
By the end of Wilde Lake Lu Brant is
convinced that she's telling this story because she doesn't want this to be her
children's legacy. But Lu is burying it because she doesn't want to face her
own role in it. When her children get old enough she can just blatantly lie to
them about everything with the same disregard her father did for the truth, so
she doesn't have to face her role in it. The greater tragedy of the novel is
that this could have all been avoided if at some point Lu had just decided to ask
her father or her brother or any of the people in her circle a question about what
had happened. And I've no doubt she would have forgave them for it.
After all they were men of their times and she
says she can't fault them. The reader can, of course, but she's made sure the
rest of the world never will.
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