Garden Lakes

by Jaime Clarke

Overview

Garden Lakes, Jaime Clarke's third novel featuring Charlie Martens, finds Charlie employed as an Arizona newspaper columnist who has built his career on a deception he committed that inadvertently stirred up anti-immigrant sentiment, casting a pall over the state. But Charlie's story is really one of serial deception, a life of prevarications he traces back to a summer fellowship program he attended while a junior at an all-boys prep school. The chosen fellows were tasked with undertaking supervised construction of a house in a half-built development donated to the school by the bankrupt developer. The fellows lived and worked together and were tested when a transient girl wandered into the development after the disappearance of both of the fellowship's chaperones. What happened at Garden Lakes reverberates through everyone's lives, but especially Charlie's, which is forever altered by his actions that summer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781448215645
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	04/15/2016
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jaime Clarke is a graduate of the University of Arizona and holds an MFA from Bennington College. He is the author of the novels We're So Famous, Vernon Downs and World Gone Water; the editor of the anthologies Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes, Conversations with Jonathan Lethem, and Talk Show: On the Couch with Contemporary Writers; and co-editor of the anthologies No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from “Post Road” Magazine (with Mary Cotton) and Boston Noir 2: The Classics (with Dennis Lehane and Mary Cotton). He is a founding editor of the literary magazine Post Road, now published at Boston College, and co-owner, with his wife, of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston.

Editorial Reviews

2016-02-03
Charlie Martens recounts an ill-fated high school program that haunts him into adulthood. Clarke (World Gone Water, 2015, etc.) develops the memorable protagonist of his previous two novels while crafting a story that stands on its own. The novel proceeds through two interwoven narratives. In one, Charlie, a junior at Randolph, an all-boys prep school, is selected to participate in a summer leadership program at Garden Lakes, an unfinished housing development in the Arizona desert. In the second, an adult Charlie is a successful newspaper columnist in Phoenix. Undercurrents of greed and self-interest unite the strands of the novel, from the creation of the fellowship on property donated by a Randolph graduate trying to keep it from being seized by the government to Charlie's career-defining investigative reporting, which sparked legislation but was predicated on deception. There is imbalance and unevenness to the plotlines, however. The present action, narrated in the third person, reads as a series of brief and incomplete interruptions. Yet the distant past unfolds in a strange first-person omniscient. Charlie is largely hidden behind the wide cast of teenage boys whose every thought and action he somehow knows. Nonetheless, it is this dramatic storyline that gives the novel its pulse. As the summer progresses, old and new rifts divide the boys into fighting factions. Abandoned by their advisers and with a heat wave reaching unbearable levels, the structured schedule breaks into fast-paced chaos reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. Charlie, an orphan and transfer student, does not appeal for pity. Still, we see that he is implicated in these events largely in an attempt to fit in. An intriguing cross-section of loneliness and power in the world of boys and men.

Kirkus Reviews