Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre

A Review by Raphael Klarfeld, MD

It is easy to see why this novel won a Lambda Literary Award at first glance because of the beautiful prose. For example, "But the wind moved across the surface of Lake Nyos. Like a tablecloth that one pushes across a tabletop, which gathers momentum and falls of its own weight to the floor, the warm water collected in one corner, then slipped down the side, past the strata of frigid water, to the depths where something lay sleeping. The villagers, who regarded Lake Nyos alternately as a benevolent mother and a sanctuary for evil spirits, would later say it was the Lake Witch." There are many beautiful descriptions such as this one.

On the other hand, one can also see why it should not have won an award. I was not sure of this until after my second reading of the novel and comments from book club members that it is not an easy novel to follow. It is actually a series of stories about different people in a small town, namely, Eula, Idaho a few hours drive from Boise. This could just as well be a book of short stories were it not for the fact that these different people and there different stories are intertwined and take place over a specific time frame that interlocks them. This makes for a novel with a lot of characters to keep up with which might have  been manageable. However, Mr. McIntyre chose to develop chapters that did not hang together and were broken up by often unrelated stories and characters in the same chapter. It caused the reader to have to suddenly shift gears and try to remember a new set of characters in the middle of the chapter. This produced an awkward flow and choppiness that would cause many readers to lose interest.

The content was intriguing. The main storyline was a high school science fair competition. The two main characters were gay teens growing up in an unenlightened, bullying midwest environment. One of them had the additional handicap of autism. The subject they chose for their project was a lake in Africa around which the villagers and cattle mysteriously died in the middle of the night. Their hypothesis was that a gas had been expelled from the lake raising the question, "Could this happen in the lake close the their own small town community?" Enrique was the planner and executor of the project, and his autistic counterpart Gene was the brains behind the planning but unable to accomplish anything involving interpersonal relations. The hidden force that killed this African community was a metaphor for the hidden forces of evil (convenient fundamentalism, primarily) in the Eula community.

The metaphorical playing out of this concept was well done, and the characters were well-developed as their roles in this concept played themselves out. If the reader was able to stick with the awkwardness of the plot organization then that reader was in the end greatly rewarded. Overall, it is a book I would recommend to those I thought were willing to stick out these difficulties with plot configuration.  I would give it three out of five stars.