Like a Lake

A vivid, imaginative response to the sensual and erotic in postwar American photography, with attention to the beauty of the nude, both male and female. The lives of Nico, his parents, and Coda embody northern California’s postwar landscape, giving way to fissures of alternative lifestyles and poetic visions. “Like a Lake is like a novella teasing an essay, or an erotic ghost haunting a fictional memoir, or a negative searching for its lost prints. It is an unnerving question-machine where desire, memory, loss and invention are staged, folded and held, tasted, re-made and undone. It’s a strange, vivid, troubling and beautiful book.”—Max Porter “Like a Lake is a story of where art comes from, the love and grief held in forms — a house, a cup, a photograph, a stone. The experience of reading this novel is lake-like — a beautiful surface opens, and opens, and opens and ripples with grief.”—Jennifer Doyle, author of Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art “Like A Lake is... like a lake. A famous one, Lake Tahoe, situated on the California/Nevada border, features plot-wise and thematically in the book, almost flowing it together... an adventurous, even pioneering, book...”—Source Magazine A vivid, imaginative response to the sensual and erotic in postwar American photography, with attention to the beauty of the nude, both male and female Carol Mavor Carol Mavor, Professor Emeritus of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester, UK, is the author of Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object (Reaktion Books, 2024) and Like the Sea (Fordham University Press, Spring 2025). A vivid, imaginative response to the sensual and erotic in postwar American photography, with attention to the beauty of the nude, both male and female When photographer Coda Gray befriends a family with a special interest in a young boy, the motivation behind his special attention is difficult to grasp, "like water slipping through our fingers." Can a man innocently love a boy who is not his own? Using fiction to reveal 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 father (an Italian- American architect) and his mother (a Japanese-American sculptor who learned how to draw while interned during World War II). Set in the 1960s, this is a story of aesthetic perfection waiting to be broken. Nico's midcentury modern house, with its Italian pottery jars along the outside and its interior lit by Japanese lanterns. The elephant-hide gray, fiberglass reinforced plastic 1951 Eames rocking chair, with metal legs and birch runners. Clam consommé with kombu, giant kelp, yuzu rind, and a little fennel—in each bowl, two clams opened like a pair of butterflies, symbols of the happy couple. Nico's boyish delight in developing photographs under the red safety light of Coda's "Floating Zendo"— the darkroom boat that he keeps on Lake Tahoe. The lives of Nico, his parents, and Coda embody northern California's postwar landscape, giving way to fissures of alternative lifestyles and poetic visions. Author Carol Mavor 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. 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.