Carol Mavor's novel Like a Lake provides an imaginative response to the sensual and erotic in postwar, midcentury American photography, with attention to the beauty of the nude, both male and female, using fiction to explore the truths about families, communities, art objects, love and mourning.
Like a Lake tells the story of ten year-old Nico who lives with his Italian-American architect father and his mother, a Japanese-American sculptor who learned how to draw while interned during World War II. The novel addresses the sensuality and complexity of a son’s love for his mother and that mother’s own erotic response to it. The relationship between the mother and son is paralleled by what it means for a boy to be a model for a male photographer and to be his muse. The lives of Nico, his parents, and Coda embody northern California’s postwar landscape, giving way to fissures of alternative lifestyles and poetic visions. Just as water can freeze into snow and ice, melt back into water, and steam, love takes on new forms with shifts of atmosphere. Like a Lake’s haunting images and sensations stay with the reader.
Carol Mavor is Professor Emeritus of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. Her books include Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object (Reaktion Books, 2024) and Like a Lake: A Story of Uneasy Love and Photography(Fordham University Press, 2020).
Fordham University Press, 144pp, 14cm x 21cm, paperback, 2025
