Growing on me

Beth sent Mary a copy of Laura Lippman's Lady in the Lake for her birthday. Or at least I think that's how this book made its way into our home. In a back jacket blurb Stephen King likens her to Ruth Rendell. High praise indeed.

So I've been reading this tale of Maddie Schwartz, a beautiful but bored Jewish housewife from 1960s Baltimore who leaves her husband and gets involved in trying to solve a the mystery of the death of a black woman from the same neighborhood Maddie's Jewish community had once occupied. Distinctively, the narrative comes from a variety of viewpoints, oscillating between that the of the victim, the detective, and a wide range of people who come into contact with the detective after she leaves her comfortable suburban nest. I was first intrigued then annoyed by this because it seemed gimmicky. But now I am coming to believe that these multiple perspectives is precisely the point.

I've seen this device before, notably in Maryse Conde's Crossing the Mangrove, which was one of five or so books from Natalie's shelf that she recommended that I read before going back to New Haven one year. But in Conde's case it was sort of a Rashomon-type device, multiple perspectives on one event.

The case of Maddie Schwartz is different. Where in the mystery novel in many cases (one things of Raymond Chandler) the mystery plot allows a detective to range across society so the reader can be exposed to various of its corners (just like old quests like Huck Finn's or Chichikov's in Dead Souls did similar things), in the case of Maddie Schwartz it's more like the detective is unleashed and, because a beautiful woman unmoored from husband and home is such a departure from the norm, she acts as a perturbation element in society. So the detective, instead of a plot device to show us society from a 3rd person perspective instead disrupts a number of individual consciousnesses, which the reader accesses. Though it's quite possible that the mystery may come to an interesting end too. I'll keep reading.