Lake City, Paperback

Contributor(s):

• Author: Thomas Kohnstamm

"Kohnstamm delivers a blistering, clear-eyed, and sure-footed debut novel about the perils and pitfalls of misdirected ambition. More than that, Lake City is a hilarious and sneakily incisive examination of the cultural tensions and widening class divides that simmer on the fringes of an increasingly homogenized Seattle--or San Francisco, or Brooklyn, or Los Angeles, or any other American city in the throes of affluenza and gentrification." --Jonathan Evison, author of Lawn Boy

The setting is Seattle's Lake City neighborhood during the 2001 holiday season. In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy and at the peak of Seattle's first wave of tech-boom gentrification--a wave that never quite made it to his neighborhood--Lane Beuche schemes how to win back his wife (and her trust fund). In his childhood bedroom in his mother's decrepit old house, the idealistic but self-serving striver Lane licks his wounds and hatches a plot.

He discovers a precarious path forward when he is contracted by a wealthy adoptive couple to seduce and sabotage a troubled birth mother from his neighborhood. Lane soon finds himself in a zero-sum game between the families as he straddles two cultures, classes, and worlds. Until finally, with the well-being of the toddler at stake, Lane must choose between wanting to do the right thing (if he could only figure out what that is) and reclaiming the life of privilege he so recently had and, he feels, so richly deserves.
 
Review citations

• Publishers Weekly - 10/15/2018