My first exposure to Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s work was through her second book Good Company, which I remember reading and finding relatively entertaining, but disliking the characters quite a bit. With her newest work, Lake Effect, Sweeney once again populates the book with unlikeable characters who pretty much spend the entire story completely oblivious to the myriad ways in which their actions and behavior hurt one another.
The dynamics of the two families at the center of the story – the Larkins and the Finnegans – are complicated at best, dysfunctional at worst, and all the characters seem to be stuck in a frustrating loop of resentment, anger, and regret that honestly became exhausting to read. To be clear, I have nothing against dysfunctional families, as I come from one myself, but the way that Sweeney crammed every annoying dysfunction imaginable into these two families with seemingly no redeeming qualities to balance things out made it truly difficult to feel sympathy for any of the characters. The men all behaved like jerks, the women were mostly caricatures on opposite ends of the spectrum (i.e.: the fanatically religious yet morally hypocritical housewife versus the radically apathetic, sexually promiscuous and morally corrupt “modern” woman), and the teenaged children all continue to behave childishly even into adulthood. I’m the type of reader who needs to have at least one character to root for, so in this case, not having a single character that I could feel even an ounce of sympathy for made this a bit of an unpleasant read for me. I read some reviews that posited perhaps Sweeney was being satiric with her portrayal of some of these characters and maybe it is the case that she was poking fun at the ridiculous behavior of privileged suburbanites, but I honestly didn’t see the humor in any of these characters’ actions or behaviors (or, perhaps, this was just a case of me not “getting” the joke).
With all that said, this wasn’t an entirely disagreeable reading experience in that there were some contentious moments where the fallout from the “scandal” (the main driving force of the entire story) came to a head, which did make for some entertaining reading. Overall though, I would say that this book wasn’t really to my taste (or perhaps I’m just tired of the “privileged people behaving badly” trope that seems to make its way into so many books nowadays) and if this hadn’t been a book club selection, I probably would not have picked it up. While I don’t regret reading this one, the fact that I wasn’t keen on both of the books I’ve read by this author is probably a sign that her works don’t jive with my tastes, so I should think twice before picking up another of her books.
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