Magical Thriller: "How a Woman Becomes a Lake" by Marjorie Celona

How a Woman Becomes a Lakeby Marjorie CelonaA review

“Missing person” stories have become the gift which keeps on giving. Over the past year I must have read about four or five novels built on the premise of a mysterious disappearance (I’m honestly losing count).  The good news is that this trope - or genre, which is what it has basically morphed into – keeps reinventing itself, with every author giving it an idiosyncratic spin.

In Marjorie Celona’s How a Woman Becomes a Lake the missing protagonist is Vera, a thirty-year old filmmaker and lecturer who lives in the small West Coast fishing town of Whale Bay, “just a stone’s throw from Canada”. On New Year’s Day 1986, Vera goes out for a walk with her dog Scout and fails to return home.  The local detectives immediately presume foul play.  Vera’s considerably older husband, Denny Gusev,  becomes a murder suspect, particularly since neighbours claim to have heard the couple heatedly argue on the evening of the disappearance. Officer Lewis Coté, however, refuses to accept this neat solution.  Just before going awol, Vera phones the Police claiming that she has found a boy in the woods. Could it have been one of Leo’s two sons, who were out near the lake on the same day?  Do the boys know more than they are letting on?

The book’s blurb describes this novel as “a literary novel with the pull and pace of a thriller, told in taut illuminating prose”.  It’s the type of description which, unfortunately, shows the stigma still associated with genre fiction.  There would have been nothing wrong or shameful with describing How a Woman Becomes a Lake as a “noir” or an outright “thriller”, because (i) that’s what it is and (ii) it is a noir/thriller in the best senses of the word. It is a page-turner which reveals its secrets cunningly. In a nod to Scandi-thrillers, it also uses landscape and nature to wonderful effect.  Also, at a more ‘philosophical’ level, it is in keeping with the noir tradition which revels in psychological and moral shadows.  The best characters have their faults, whilst even the worst have redeeming features.

Celona borrows her title from a New Yorker essay by Jia Tolentino, which in turn references Ovid. This title, with its echoes of Classical mythology, suggests a magical realist aspect to the novel, one which becomes apparent in its more whimsical, poetic chapters.  It also invites a metaphorical reading of the book: a cry against the gender politics of a patriarchal society, reflected in the expectations society makes of Vera, of Evelina and, conversely, of Lewis, Leo and Denny.

How a Woman Becomes A Lake provides much food for thought.  Which, of course, does not make it any less of an exciting noir.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication: March 3rd 2020 by Hamish Hamilton