Where This Lake Is (New American Voices Series , Vol 1)

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Summary: Jeff Lodge's WHERE THIS LAKE IS--an endearing tale
Review: Jeff Lodge's 183 page novel tells Jerry Hopkins's sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking tale of his life "so far." Jerry boards up his family hardware store, and, with his wife Audrey, leaves his dying town of Aiken, Ohio, to move to Columbus. Subsequent moves are chronicled from there to Denver to Tuscon to Sololá, Guatemala, where Jerry (minus Audrey) buys a restaurant/pub. Quiet, unpretentious Jerry writes of all these changes in his personal journal because he finds the inherited responsibility of keeping his family journals daunting. Finding himself as the keeper of his family's history and innermost thoughts has never set too well. But as time goes on, Jerry finds a connection through the journals with his family members, both alive and dead. The strength he finds and the self discovery he makes enable him to cope with one day finding himself the chief suspect in a murder involving his employee, Gonzalo. Jerry's handling of this situation, along with help from other Guatemalans--the lovely Nati, sometime barmaid/lover, and the spoon-wielding cook, Carmela--provides engaging reading. Hopkins's family becomes yours. Lodge is a graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University.

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Summary: Where's this books point?
Review: Labeling Where This Lake Is as a mystery is probably not a very good idea. Jeff Lodge's novella spends the first half of the novel largely concentrating on his narrator's personal history. About page 90, the narrator finally realizes "[he] had a mystery on his hands." Lodge creates a protagonist, Jerry Hopkins, who is incredibly passive. Events happen to him without any imput from him and, it seems, very little reaction. A large part of Lodge's back story takes place in small town that Hopkins' family founded. Symbolically, the town is deserted within a few years after his father's death and he is divorced shortly thereafter. Furthermore, the menfolk of his family have kept journals for generations which Jerry has neglected. The town fails. The marriage fails. The journals fail. Hopkins might care, but we can't tell. Why has Lodge chosen an uncharismatic " loser" as his protagonist? The mystery aspect takes place in Guatemala where the protagonist is again forced into passivity by his inability to speak Spanish. Details of a murder that may involve a CIA plot unfold in fits and starts as the action is repeatedly interrupted by the protagonist's lame past. In short, this is not exactly a page-turner, but if read more as an understanding of human inaction, which is done very plausibly, and for the details of small town life in Ohio, it does contain some interesting reading.