A little girl stumbles into a pet shop. We're led to believe that the creepy store clerk semi-accidentally murders this girl.....but, later, it's revealed that the clerk's elderly mother did the deed. (Shades of "Psycho" here.)
An African-American woman is targeted by a wealthy white businessman. Conveniently, the woman seems to drown in a fountain. Or did she murder her roommate, toss her roommate in the fountain, and leave some "clues" to suggest that heavy drugs played a role they hadn't actually played?
A woman in need of cash suddenly loses her heavily-insured engagement ring. Did someone really steal that ring--or is it hidden underneath an African violet, in the living room?
These are all scenarios that interest the novelist Laura Lippman, and they're all a part of "Lady in the Lake," Lippman's most-recent novel. Lippman likes to borrow from actual life--her novel, "What the Dead Know," e.g., takes details from a famous Maryland case in which two kids went missing from a mall--and "Lady in the Lake" continues the tradition. A few decades ago, a black woman was murdered, and her case was ignored in the papers, and race clearly played a role in the weird lack-of-coverage.
Lippman has said she is especially interested in how women survive in America, and her fiction (though it's sexy, shocking crime fiction, on the surface) is a lifelong intellectual project, a way of examining gender roles. When Lippman speaks at a bookstore, she might quietly observe that most of the questions she fields come from men, and she might wonder aloud why men seem to feel more entitled to speak up.
"Lady in the Lake" concerns a married woman in her late thirties who notices she hasn't made a mark on the world; the woman abruptly leaves her marriage and begins a career as a writer/reporter, even though this simply isn't "done" in the sixties. Lippman herself famously left journalism in early-middle-age, and exited a marriage, and reinvented herself as a novelist attached to the big-hitter David Simon (who created "The Wire").
Certain writers simply exist on your wavelength, and the things that interest Lippman are pretty consistently the things that interest me. What are the unwritten "rules" in America, and what happens to you if you challenge those rules? How does the press shape (and sometimes distort) our understanding of reality? (You can maybe see why Lippman is married to David Simon.) ....When is madness a viable excuse, and when is it just a disguise, an iffy way of "reframing" bad behavior?
I like Lippman's work, and I especially like her book recommendations--which have led me to "Until the Twelfth of Never: The Deadly Divorce of Betty Broderick" (great non-fiction), and have inspired me to daydream about reading James M. Cain (more on that later, maybe). I also love Lippman's friendship with Meghan Abbott, another unusually-brainy crime novelist. I'd like for the two to interview each other at least once per week.
Stay tuned for Lippman's first book of essays, due in August, this year.....
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/books/review/laura-lippman-by-the-book.html
An African-American woman is targeted by a wealthy white businessman. Conveniently, the woman seems to drown in a fountain. Or did she murder her roommate, toss her roommate in the fountain, and leave some "clues" to suggest that heavy drugs played a role they hadn't actually played?
A woman in need of cash suddenly loses her heavily-insured engagement ring. Did someone really steal that ring--or is it hidden underneath an African violet, in the living room?
These are all scenarios that interest the novelist Laura Lippman, and they're all a part of "Lady in the Lake," Lippman's most-recent novel. Lippman likes to borrow from actual life--her novel, "What the Dead Know," e.g., takes details from a famous Maryland case in which two kids went missing from a mall--and "Lady in the Lake" continues the tradition. A few decades ago, a black woman was murdered, and her case was ignored in the papers, and race clearly played a role in the weird lack-of-coverage.
Lippman has said she is especially interested in how women survive in America, and her fiction (though it's sexy, shocking crime fiction, on the surface) is a lifelong intellectual project, a way of examining gender roles. When Lippman speaks at a bookstore, she might quietly observe that most of the questions she fields come from men, and she might wonder aloud why men seem to feel more entitled to speak up.
"Lady in the Lake" concerns a married woman in her late thirties who notices she hasn't made a mark on the world; the woman abruptly leaves her marriage and begins a career as a writer/reporter, even though this simply isn't "done" in the sixties. Lippman herself famously left journalism in early-middle-age, and exited a marriage, and reinvented herself as a novelist attached to the big-hitter David Simon (who created "The Wire").
Certain writers simply exist on your wavelength, and the things that interest Lippman are pretty consistently the things that interest me. What are the unwritten "rules" in America, and what happens to you if you challenge those rules? How does the press shape (and sometimes distort) our understanding of reality? (You can maybe see why Lippman is married to David Simon.) ....When is madness a viable excuse, and when is it just a disguise, an iffy way of "reframing" bad behavior?
I like Lippman's work, and I especially like her book recommendations--which have led me to "Until the Twelfth of Never: The Deadly Divorce of Betty Broderick" (great non-fiction), and have inspired me to daydream about reading James M. Cain (more on that later, maybe). I also love Lippman's friendship with Meghan Abbott, another unusually-brainy crime novelist. I'd like for the two to interview each other at least once per week.
Stay tuned for Lippman's first book of essays, due in August, this year.....
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/books/review/laura-lippman-by-the-book.html
Comments
Post a Comment