LAKE LIFE

After a terrible accident, secrets, shames, and fears emerge among six people sharing a last weekend at a lake house in this impressive debut novel.

A child slips off a boat and drowns in the deep water of a North Carolina lake. It happens near the family vacation house that Richard and Lisa Starling, winding down careers at Cornell University, will soon sell, coincidentally on the birthday of a daughter who lived only a month. They’ve never told their sons about her. The elder is a heavy drinker awash in debt and upset that his wife is pregnant because they agreed to remain childless. The younger son takes meds for depression and anxiety after two suicide attempts. He hasn’t told his parents that he’s been jobless for two years or that he’s a pothead living off his boyfriend, a hot new artist in New York who has been mum about not finishing a painting in six months and struggles with his partner’s need for monogamy. The parents, BTW, are dealing with a recent infidelity of their own. Poissant—author of the short story collection The Heaven of Animals (2014)—builds the narrative and the faceted theme of children lost and found through well-crafted scenes while making good use of the close third-person point of view, albeit with some cliché and overwriting. His gradual uncloseting of the sextet’s many skeletons—including the anathema of a vote for Trump—is cleverly handled, although he tends to offer pat answers where one might expect more complication. As for the ending, it won’t spoil anything to say Poissant makes some curious decisions in resolving this murmuration of Starlings.

A well-wrought family tale from a talented writer.