The Boy in the Lake

✍ Scribed by Swanson, Eric

• Book ID: 109285726
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 104 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0312202814

✦ Synopsis

Overview: New York social worker/psychotherapist Christian Fowler returns to his Ohio hometown after three decades, seeking absolution from a friend he betrayed, in Swanson's accomplished, beautifully paced tale of self-discovery and forgiveness. Though the ostensible cause of his return is his grandmother's death, Chris is driven to track down boyhood companion Reis Paley, a troubled Alabama-born delinquent with whom Chris had a secret homosexual relationship at age 12. When homophobic classmates brutally beat Reis, Chris (who had led the thugs to Reis) begged them to stop, but--helpless and outnumbered--he ran away, eager to conceal his own, only dimly acknowledged sexual identity. In a poignant narrative, at once lyrical and precise, the adult Chris shuttles between his jealous anxieties over Richard, his live-in companion of 10 years who's been sleeping around, and therapy sessions with a mocking patient named Stephen, a self-hating, closeted high-school dropout who becomes a prostitute. Shadowing his present-day life are intensely vivid memories of his own painful Ohio boyhood with a laconic Czech-American coalminer father and a constantly drunken mother who fancies herself a descendant of a long line of Irish royalty. Swanson's second novel (after The Greenhouse Effect) resonates with haunting metaphors: the lake where Chris first meets Reis and where Chris's father accidentally drowns is where Chris scatters the ashes of his grandmother. Emotionally weighted with suspense, this story will appeal to straight and gay readers, and seems especially timely given the recent visibility of hate crimes and anti-gay violence.