Lake City
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Lake City is a darkly funny and extremely relevant debut novel about American inequality and moral authority, featuring a sad–sack antihero who takes way too long to grow up. When he finally does, the results are beautiful, and the book ultimately becomes an elegy for a now–gone Seattle, and a lesson in how the place we’re from never fully lets us go.” —Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See
Hunkered down in his childhood bedroom in Seattle's worn–out Lake City neighborhood, idealistic but self–serving striver Lane Bueche licks his wounds and hatches a plot to win back his estranged Manhattanite wife.
He discovers a precarious path forward when he is contracted by a wealthy adoptive couple to seduce and sabotage a troubled birth mother from his neighborhood. Lane soon finds himself in a zero–sum game between the families as he straddles two cultures, classes, and worlds. Until finally, with the well–being of the toddler at stake, Lane must choose between wanting to do the right thing (if he could only figure out what that is) and reclaiming his idea of privilege.
"Snarky social commentary on the world of Seattle have–nots." —Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kohnstamm's fiction debut (after memoir Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?) is all at once hip, intrepid, and philosophical. Lane Beuche worked his way out of the low-income status of his childhood in Seattle's bleak Lake City neighborhood to attend college, backsliding once and almost ending his academic endeavors. But then he meets Mia, who has trust fund wealth, and soon after, Lane and Mia are married and living in New York City as Lane pursues his PhD at Columbia. His downward spiral begins when the marriage hits a rough spot after the 9/11 attacks, and Lane returns to his mother's home in Lake City. He obsesses about returning to his wife and life in New York while he tries to endure the emotionally draining environment of his youth that can be "like a soft choke by someone with bad taste and sweaty palms." Adrift, he makes an ill-advised decision to help a rich, type-A personality woman and her spouse adopt a baby from a drug-addicted local, and the simultaneously impulsive and irresolute Lane becomes entangled in the drama. Kohnstamm's fresh voice has a millennial groove, the story is engaging and gritty, and there's an impressive scrutiny of personal and societal ethics.
