Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club

“‘It’s time, Mariel. At our age, none of us knows how much time we have.’

Mariel hated it when other people played that card, especially on behalf of other old people. In her experience, it was true of everyone, at every age.”

Mariel’s dislike of Hazel’s attempt to guilt her into reconciling with Florence due to Florence’s age foreshadows two revelations, one in Mariel’s past and one in her future. Mariel’s son, Gus, died at the age of three, so she knows that age is not inherently connected to life or death. Similarly, in the last chapters of the novel, it is revealed that Mariel herself dies young after suffering from lung cancer.

“‘Men are fragile, honey,’ Betty said. ‘If I told a man that he had too much to drink and was liable to kill himself, he might regard it as an insult. And men often lose grace and composure when they feel insulted.’”

Though young Florence sees her mother’s flirtation with men as a sign of Betty’s desire for affection, Betty’s comment here suggests that her tactics for managing men’s feelings (in a world unsafe for girls and women) is more strategic than Florence understands. This illustrates the novel’s focus on how different generations have a limited ability to understand each other, particularly as concerns mothers and daughters.

“He saw as she got closer that she was a little heavier than he’d remembered and had a burn scar on her hand and all kinds of moles and freckles that had been disguised by his own revisionism. In other words, she was normal, and she was perfect.”

Ned’s comments about “revisionism” when he meets Mariel for the first time allude to his seeing the woman wearing white months earlier. The novel never clarifies if that woman is Mariel—at first, she agrees the woman was her, but 15 years later she denies having ever been there. Regardless, Ned’s tendency to fantasize about the woman of his dreams does not limit his romanticizing Mariel.

“At one point, he shifted on the blanket, and his bare arm touched her bare arm. She didn’t move hers, and he didn’t move his either, and lying there, talking, with their arms touching, was so unbearably sexy, he’d think of it for years.”

Ned often sentimentalizes the narrative of his young life, playing into Stradal’s exploration of simple pleasures. Ned here experiences the excitement of first love, something that the text projects into the future (Ned thinking of the event for years to come).

“What good is a family business if it doesn’t keep the family together?”

Ned’s hope that Carla will come to work with him at Jorby’s provides an element of ironic foreshadowing. As Jorby’s becomes a conglomerate, no longer a family restaurant, it divides Ned and Carla, who end the novel having not spoken in years. Mariel’s family restaurant, by contrast, keeps the family together for generations—and creates a new family when Julia, at the end of the novel, sells the Lakeside.

“[Florence] didn’t want to see her mother be settled for. She was too great a woman, and deserved better.”

As Florence ages, her relationship with her mother, Floyd, and Archie becomes complex. The stability provided by Floyd’s arrival in their lives allows Florence to be better able to appreciate her mother’s “greatness,” which causes her to love Floyd. This, in turn, leads her to value Floyd’s clear love for Archie. In the end, though, Florence chooses her mother’s happiness—and her own, outing the two men by revealing their romance.

“Floyd tried to smile at her, and although it was a kind smile, it was hard to watch. Florence didn’t see a person about to get married to the love of his life. At the time, she couldn’t have described what she saw. Many years later she realized she’d seen a person whose boat had sunk and who was holding on to flotsam for survival. And there he was, smiling at the hurricane who’d capsized his happy, calm existence and replaced it with a life of floating, a life of getting by.”

Florence’s extended metaphor about outing Archie and Floyd’s romance—that all Floyd can do is survey the wreckage of his life after the hurricane of Florence’s meddling with a rueful “smile”—layers the text’s narrative present and its future. Thus, though Florence’s narrative voice is no longer present after Mariel reaches adulthood, other characters’ points of view hint at her shifting feelings in adulthood toward the aftermath of her choice.

“Although, like most boys, [Al] was much handsomer when he was quiet.”

Florence’s observations about Al indicate her dismissive attitude toward men overall, which is consistent throughout the novel. It also suggests that though she will later consider Al the love of her life, part of this abiding love may come from the fact that she and Al are not together—she instead is able to keep the imagined, quiet version of Al alive in her head without needing to contend with the reality of the man.

“At last, [Florence’s] support and involvement, even if unsolicited and only on her terms, would be regarded by all as helpful and kind.”

Ned’s observation about his mother-in-law, colored by Mariel’s view of her mother, builds on the novel’s theme of Shared and Unshared Intergenerational Knowledge between mothers and daughters. The novel is never entirely clear on the extent to which readers can trust narrators’ perceptions of others; while Florence acts selfishly through much of Mariel’s life, our sense of Florence’s self-centeredness comes from Mariel’s resentful impressions, not the objective description of an omniscient narrator. Florence’s self-framing as a “helpful grandmother,” furthermore, indicates the difference between societal sentimentalizing of motherhood and how this labor (and interference) actually functions within a family.

“A year later, [Bobby Eaton would] drop out over Christmas break and join the Army Air Forces, and three years after that, his bomber would be shot down over Czechoslovakia. But in the summer of 1940, Bobby Eaton was still a sweet young man who’d never left Minnesota.”

This allusion to World War II, present in a chapter in which Al and Florence break up on their first date due to their incompatible visions for the future, suggests the inevitability of the future—and how planning for that future is a fraught project. This further connotes the novel’s thematic vision of the inexorable march of progress and history—for good or for ill.

“‘I actually think I’d be a good mother,’ she told him. ‘If I wanted to do it, and I don’t.’”

Florence’s comment about her capacity to be a good mother, if she wanted to be, draws upon the novel’s attention to coerced versus willing motherhood—a darker lens on the Burdens and Joys of Motherhood. Though Florence loves Mariel, her unwillingness to do the work of motherhood leads her to resent her husband for pressuring her into the role. This creates friction between mother and daughter that continues into their adulthood.

“While Floyd and Betty were a machine who ran the Lakeside Inn together with steady harmony and precision, Floyd and Archie were a fireworks display.”

Stradal here contrasts the functional relationship of companionate marriage with the passion of a clandestine affair. Floyd’s marriage, ordered by compulsory heterosexuality, thus emerges as analogous to Florence’s (socially pressured but not personally desired) motherhood: They work, but they are joyless.

“It was nice to hear that his father felt bad about [rarely seeing Ned as a child], but as a father himself now, Ned had no clue how any parent could live a life without regret. Like most parents, he just had to choose which regrets he could live with.”

Ned’s ability to better understand his father after becoming a father himself contrasts with the relationships between mothers and daughters in the novel, which do not become less opaque after the next generation is born. Ned’s belief that he can “choose” his regrets is a bleak foreshadowing of the accidental death of Ned’s son, Gus.

“Everyone knows that the worst invention in world history is the surprise. There’s a reason they don’t exist in the animal kingdom unless murder is involved.”

Florence’s reaction to her husband’s meticulously planned anniversary surprise indicates the emotional distance between Florence and Gustav, who, due to his infrequent presence in the novel, is also an emotional enigma to the reader. Her assertion that “everyone knows” her stance illustrates Florence’s pervasive certainty in the rightness of her own perspective. 

“To her credit, Brenda didn’t dispense any advice or pat words of comfort. The only time she addressed the topic, she said, ‘It’s sad. I think we should take some time to be sad about it.’”

Brenda’s willingness to sit with negative emotions strikes Mariel as unusual in the polite society of Minnesota. Though this lack of care for social norms has led Brenda, who had affairs with several married men, to be ostracized in Bear Jaw, it proves the attitude Mariel needs following her lost pregnancy and offers a basis for a long-term friendship.

“[Florence] watched her baby girl’s chin quiver in her sleep and felt an unmistakable envy. To start over, with no knowledge, no memory—what she wouldn’t do to trade places with this infant.”

Florence’s envy when she looks at baby Mariel speaks to a desire to be mothered when one becomes a mother, a theme the novel regularly explores. This is repeated in Mariel’s willingness to reconnect with Florence after a decade apart during her own pregnancy; mothers, the novel asserts, need their own mothers, too.

“Twenty years ago, someone like [Cayla] might spend a few decades working here, fall in love with a co-worker, and build a life, like Florence’s friend Lois had. Now, Mariel would be lucky if a kid as smart as Cayla lasted more than a summer.”

While the novel has a fraught relationship with progress, noting the ways that it threatens beloved institutions like the Lakeside, the text here offers a mild recognition that Mariel’s struggle to keep talented workers parallels greater opportunities for young women like Cayla. Held against the dearth of opportunities that Betty and Florence faced, this increase in potential careers and life paths is shown as an overall positive.

“[Florence had] kept her girl safe for so long, and the reward was always going to be abandonment. She just didn’t think the terms would be so extreme.”

Florence laments one of the inherent tensions of parenthood: that raising children means teaching them to no longer need their parents. Rather than accepting this as a natural process of life, however, Florence dictates the terms of her “abandonment” by stealing Mariel’s out-of-state college applications from the mail.

“For all its natural beauty, Bear Jaw still had a lot of ugliness. People here liked to say they rooted for the underdog, but some of them got real quiet when the underdog was different from them.”

Mariel recognizes the hypocrisy of insular Bear Jaw when considering the kinds of prejudice that Kyle, a gay, Korean-born adoptee, may face. While Bear Jaw’s remoteness is largely held up as positive, Stradal illustrates that this positivity is only experienced by homogenous locals and may not equally apply to those outside this narrow social sphere.

“Mariel, the gawky, overweight bar trainee, had bagged the catch of Bear Jaw Lake. She’d won, and done it without trying. And she and Ned had been together ever since.”

While the novel does not go so far as to suggest that Mariel was only interested in Ned for his money, this mercenary view of their relationship offers a sharp contrast to Ned’s romantic ideals about love at first sight. The novel thus suggests that romantic ideals are primarily accessible to the wealthy and casts doubt on one of the longest-standing romantic relationships in the text.

“[Florence] was suddenly the most helpful person in town. It was maddening.”

Mariel’s irritation at her mother’s rise to fame for staying in the church shows her frustration with the way Florence weaponizes conventional narratives about age and motherhood. By stubbornly remaining in the church, Florence makes herself an elderly martyr, disregarded by her careless young daughter—without offering any space to address the nuances of her relationship with Mariel. When the two finally speak, Florence denies wanting attention, though the novel does not clarify whether this claim is true.

“She thought then about how the word ‘miscarriage’ is horrible, mis-carry, how it blames the woman, as if she failed or made a mistake, when it’s the embryo that’s unviable.”

Mariel’s consideration of the language around pregnancy loss plays into the novel’s larger look at how mothers are characterized as “failures” by their daughters. This notion that mothers are blamed for issues beyond their control invites the reader to question the other things the children in the text have blamed their mothers for—such as Betty’s continual relocation or Florence’s self-absorption.

“‘Like I told you, you are the way you are,’ Dr. Eaton said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that. Everybody needs help sometimes. You just needed help with this.’”

Mariel feels highly affirmed by this statement by her doctor and friend. That she previously felt shame over her difficulty conceiving indicates how motherhood is framed as synonymous with successful womanhood. For Mariel to have no living children feels, to her, like a failure that she should hide at all costs. Reframing that narrative allows her to find greater peace.