The Inn At Lake Devine

It didn't really take me a month to read this book. It took me about 4 days. Life interrupted.

This is probably the earliest Elinor Lipman books that I have read (though I did see the movie made from her first book.) All the classic Lipman skills are evident, just not as sharp. The dialogue is there, the quick wit, and the ever-surging plotline, but none quite as honed as her later books.

Somehow, I like it better. That there is a bit more description. A few side trips. How it takes her more time to explore the depth and changes of her characters. I'm up for the slower, weightier Lipman.

Times change. The svelte dialogue and rushed plots of her more recent works fit our world now. But this book came out in 1998 and was set almost 30 years earlier. It was a slower time. No computers. No smart phones. No internet. Just people meeting people where they were.

In this case, the impetus for the story was a letter, stating Gentiles were preferred at the title's namesake inn. Imagine my surprise when the back of the book acknowledgements mentioned the author's mother. It said “Julia Lipman, who remembered after thirty-five years the exact working of the letter from the hotel on the lake.”

Art inspired by real life is always the best.