A Story of Uneasy Love and Photography
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A vivid, imaginative response to the sensual and erotic in postwar American photography, with attention to the beauty of the nude, both male and female
When photographer Coda Gray befriends a family with a special interest in a young boy, the motivation behind his special attention is difficult to grasp, “like water slipping through our fingers.” Can a man innocently love a boy who is not his own?
Using fiction to reveal the truths about families, communities, art objects, love, and mourning, Like a Lake tells the story of ten-year-old Nico, who lives with his father (an Italian- American architect) and his mother (a Japanese-American sculptor who learned how to draw while interned during World War II). Set in the 1960s, this is a story of aesthetic perfection waiting to be broken. Nico’s midcentury modern house, with its Italian pottery jars along the outside and its interior lit by Japanese lanterns. The elephant-hide gray, fiberglass reinforced plastic 1951 Eames rocking chair, with metal legs and birch runners. Clam consommé with kombu, giant kelp, yuzu rind, and a little fennel—in each bowl, two clams opened like a pair of butterflies, symbols of the happy couple. Nico’s boyish delight in developing photographs under the red safety light of Coda’s “Floating Zendo”— the darkroom boat that he keeps on Lake Tahoe.
The lives of Nico, his parents, and Coda embody northern California’s postwar landscape, giving way to fissures of alternative lifestyles and poetic visions. Author Carol Mavor addresses the sensuality and complexity of a son’s love for his mother and that mother’s own erotic response to it. The relationship between the mother and son is paralleled by what it means for a boy to be a model for a male photographer and to be his muse. Just as water can freeze into snow and ice, melt back into water, and steam, love takes on new forms with shifts of atmosphere. Like a Lake’s haunting images and sensations stay with the reader.
Like a Lake is like a novella teasing an essay, or an erotic ghost haunting a fictional memoir, or a negative searching for its lost prints. It is an unnerving question-machine where desire, memory, loss and invention are staged, folded and held, tasted, re-made and undone. It’s a strange, vivid, troubling and beautiful book.---Max Porter
Like a Lake is a story of where art comes from, the love and grief held in forms — a house, a cup, a photograph, a stone. The experience of reading this novel is lake-like — a beautiful surface opens, and opens, and opens and ripples with grief.---Jennifer Doyle, author of Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art
Like A Lake is... like a lake. A famous one, Lake Tahoe, situated on the California/Nevada border, features plot-wise and thematically in the book, almost flowing it together... an adventurous, even pioneering, book...---Source Magazine
Millions of Years Ago | 1
My Nico | 2
Unfolding a Flood | 4
Turning the Key | 5
The Memory of Lake Tahoe | 16
My Mother’s Eyes | 17
My Mother | 18
Coda | 21
By Chance | 25
When Bamboo Shoots Poke Their Heads out of the Earth | 29
Blue Rambler | 30
Tender Buttons | 47
Waiting | 49
Refusing to be Plucked | 55
We Want Roses | 56
She Sleeps with Him Every Night | 59
She-Wolf Made of Rock | 61
Blue Ticket | 65
Learning to Swim | 66
Floating Studio, Floating Zendo | 67
Fannette Island | 76
Floating Zendos and Mentorgartens | 79
I Learned about Snowflakes | 82
I Learned about the Birds of Lake Tahoe | 84
Summer Snow Cake | 86
Love or Affection | 88
Mary’s Dream | 89
Each Other’s Pockets | 90
Black Cloth | 91
Brown Kimono | 94
Something Broke | 96
The Voice of the Lake | 101
Moon Writing | 102
Artichoke | 104
No Name for Him | 107
What’s in a Name? | 108
Like Piles of Laundry? | 109
Frozen Pond | 111
Coda’s Dream | 113
Like Mother and Son | 114
Fifteen Good Prints | 115
Glass Moon | 117
Tsukimi Udon (Moon Noodles) | 118
Soaring | 121
Walking Underwater | 123
Open My Heart | 125
Like Rice on Chopsticks | 126
Like a Sequence of Poems | 127
Waiting, Still | 128
Morpheus | 129
Blue Marble | 131
Something Like Love | 132
Afterword (Afterward): Like the Navel of My Dream of Nico | 133
Acknowledgments | 139
Illustrations | 141
Notes | 143