Lady in the Lake

“No one outside my family was supposed to care. I was a careless girl who went out on a date with the wrong person and was never seen again. You came in at the end of my story and turned it into your beginning. Why’d you have to go and do that, Madeline Schwartz? Why couldn’t you stay in your beautiful house and your good-enough marriage, and let me be at the bottom of the fountain? I was safe there. Everybody was safer when I was there.”

Central to the plot of Lady in the Lake is the mystery of what really transpired on the night Cleo Sherwood disappeared. Retrospective and often cryptic, Cleo’s chapters never identify when she is speaking or from where. She offers commentary, insight, and clarification that is chronologically relevant to the points in the novel at which her chapters appear, but she rarely outpaces what the audience learns through Maddie and the individual minor character chapters. These words concluding the novel’s opening chapter raise key questions in the reader’s mind, among them why a young woman would not want anyone applying scrutiny to the circumstances of her death.

“The things she had failed to do were twenty years behind her, when she had first known Wally—and her first love, the one her mother never suspected. She had sworn she would be—what, exactly? Someone creative and original, someone who cared not at all about public opinion. […] He had promised. He was going to take her away from stodgy Baltimore, they were going to live a passionate life devoted to art and adventure. She had kept him out of her mind for all these years. […] Maddie fell asleep paging through an imaginary calendar, trying to calculate the best time to leave her marriage.”

In this first chapter devoted to Maddie’s experience, Lippman depicts the catalyst for Maddie’s decision to leave her husband, Milton. The caution and hesitance with which Maddie manages interactions between herself and a former high school acquaintance betrays her keen awareness of Perspective’s Role in Shaping Reality; she has conscientiously and successfully used this awareness to curate others’ impressions of her, especially her husband’s, in the two decades she has been married. Wally’s presence, though, forces Maddie to make a comparison between the life she is leading and what she once imagined for herself, making her decision to leave her husband seem at once both sudden and matter of fact.