Penguin Books
352 Pages
This book, Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club by J. Ryan Stradel came to me via our good friend, Howie Balaban. He recommended this book as well as one of Stradel’s other books, The Lager Queen of Minnesota. Howie even wrote a review of the latter book for this website. Since reading this book, I have also read the other book, and I will also add my own review of that one in the near future. I’ll probably even reference Howie’s review in my take on the novel.
The Lakeside Supper Club has been in Mariel Prager’s family for several decades. The old fashioned family restaurant has seen better days and the tiny Minnesota institution could be suffering through its final days. Her husband, Ned, also comes from a restaurant business, but his family owned a chain of restaurants throughout the area. They could live comfortably, but Mariel is intent on sticking with tradition. This obstinance has forever caused a rift between Mariel and her mother, Florence. The friction between generations could even spread to another generation.
Tragedy brings everything into focus for Muriel and her family. Maybe it’s time to move on, despite her deep misgivings. Or maybe it’s the past, through the Lakeside Supper Club, that will be their salvation. This novel explores the midwestern values of family life in Minnesota. How neighbors, friends, and families treat each other is the focus of the narrative, set against a tapestry that reminds the reader of yesteryear.
Stradel writes his female characters with a clarity that is often missing from male authors. Most of the time, in my opinion, male authors have a very difficult time capturing the essence of what it is to be a woman, her thoughts, hopes, and dreams. Meanwhile female authors, by and large, seem to grasp their male characters much easier than their male counterparts with women characters. Stradel excels in his creation of his female characters. They seem real, ready to walk off the page into our world. The reader feels full empathy with each of them. The same cannot be said of his male characters.
Stradel’s male characters are not even pawns on a chessboard, simply mere shadows that move with the days as they pass. They’re not even stereotypical men. They are just there one minute and gone the next. They do not elicit a response from anyone, the readers or the other characters in the book. Even when something tragic happens, the reader feels nothing. The characters to whom they’re most closely attached barely register any emotion regarding their male counterparts. For me, that detracts from an overall great story. The characters should be well rounded, even the background players. Stradel fails to do that. It is a shortcoming that I hope he overcomes as he writes more books.
Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club by J. Ryan Stradel has a great story to tell. Putting aside some of his character development to focus on what’s actually happening, the reader is regaled with a story that rings true for small town people. We all know that family-owned restaurant or business that everyone goes to, because “that’s what we’ve always done.” And once those people start to die out, the businesses slowly fade away, too. This novel explores all that and makes you long for those days when you were young and hit up the local soda fountain or mall to meet up with friends. That wisp of nostalgia is woven throughout this narrative.
I highly recommend Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club for these factors. If you want to recapture a little of that small town feel, this is a book that you should read. The relationships between the people of the town and the businesses drive this novel forward, and will remind you of what you once loved.
Craig Bacon likes reading stories where the surroundings, like the towns, are as much of a character as the people who walk its streets.