Book Review

By Derryll White

Lippman, Laura (2016).  Wilde Lake.

“I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore. You can look far and wide, but you’ll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It’s as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay.”
― John Waters

Laura Lippman is a deceptive writer who never strays far from Baltimore, her beloved hometown.  In ‘Wilde Lake’ she goes on with very common, direct language, taking the reader into a complex family tale.  And there is a lot of detail and a wide cast of characters.  Then all of a sudden the story narrows to Luisa “Lu” Brant, state’s attorney of Howard County, Maryland.  The story gets complex and kinky.

Lippman keeps “Lu” Brant curious but very real.  She gives her character a superior intellect and a dominating determination to seek out the truth, perhaps even to define what truth is.  The author exposes many of the impediments and stumbling points that hold women back from top positions, from being leaders, but she accepts no excuses.  Luisa Brant pushes through the pain of family secrets for an unvarnished truth that hurts.

The journey is captivating, the story is powerfully told, and the reader is left thinking that reading more of Laura Lippman might be a good thing.

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Excerpts from the novel:

WOMEN – Meow, she thinks, shaking her head and smiling at herself.  Cattiness is a waste of good energy.  Lu doesn’t feel competitive about other women.  Lu feels competitive about everybody.

CONSEQUENCES – “A lot of people are on the streets who should be in care,” AJ says.  “Schizophrenics.  People with severe mental illnesses.”

“And there are a lot of people on the street who aren’t schizophrenics.  You know that, AJ.  A diagnosis of mental illness isn’t enough to avoid consequences for one’s actions.”
CHANGE – They are socially awkward people.  Given their own limitations, perhaps they never recognized their son’s problems.  Oddness used to be more acceptable.  Some people were just weird.  Now anyone who seems the least bit off has to have a label, a diagnosis, be “on the spectrum.”

TRUTH – So you will have to trust me when I tell you my story is true.  I guess I could swear on my children’s lives – but that strikes me as distasteful.  Sometimes I think we hold the truth in too high an esteem.  The truth is a tool, like a kitchen knife.  You can use it for its purpose or you can use it – No, that’s not quite right.  The truth is inert, it has no intrinsic power.  Lies have all the power.  Would you lie to save your child’s life?  I would, in a heartbeat, no matter what object I was touching.  Besides, what is the whole truth and nothing but the truth?  The truth is not a finite commodity that can be contained within identifiable borders.  The truth is messy, riotous, overrunning everything.  You can never know the whole truth of anything.

And if you could, you would wish you didn’t.

MEMORY – What if criminal attorneys start to use ‘memory experts,’ they way, say, medical trials present experts on both sides of malpractice cases?  Then again, the average person is reluctant to admit to a less-than-stellar memory until a certain age, although Lu knows lots of women who will cop to “mom brain” during pregnancy and menopause.  The fear of dementia is part of this culture of denial, Lu believes, but she also thinks memory is part of the holy trinity of self.  Ask anyone and they’ll tell you: they have a good memory, good taste, and a good sense of humor.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org

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