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Lakewood
Wrought with angst over his young sister’s death, nineteen-year-old Robert English returns to his childhood town to discover family secrets, adventure, and the love of his life.
“Secret rooms, buried grief, the turbulence of love. The appealing young man who narrates this engaging novel encounters them all on a momentous journey through a summer in which he must face the ghosts of the past and the challenges of the present on his way to a future all his own.” —Pam Durban, author of All Set About with Fever Trees and Other Stories
"Lakewood, William Walsh’s debut novel, is the story of one young man’s summer of discovery. Set during the Nixon years, it chronicles the journey of Robert English as he lays down old grief, finds and loses new love, and changes paths as he sets out on an odyssey to find himself and his place in the world. This well-written coming-of-age epistolary explores important truths about the transition from childhood to what comes after in a style reminiscent of J.D. Salinger. With a poet’s eye for detail and language, William Walsh has given us a story worth reading and remembering." —Raymond L. Atkins, author of Set List and Sweetwater Blues
“Lakewood is a wonderful novel, filled with the joys and suffering of a young man who agrees to house-sit during the summer of ’73 in the home where he grew up. Told in the pitch-perfect voice of a college student, it is filled with the pain of memory and hope for a new life. This is a strong, poignant story that will hold your attention like a secret room.” —Philip Lee Williams, author of Far Beyond the Gates
“Secret rooms, buried grief, the turbulence of love. The appealing young man who narrates this engaging novel encounters them all on a momentous journey through a summer in which he must face the ghosts of the past and the challenges of the present on his way to a future all his own.” —Pam Durban, author of All Set About with Fever Trees and Other Stories
"Lakewood, William Walsh’s debut novel, is the story of one young man’s summer of discovery. Set during the Nixon years, it chronicles the journey of Robert English as he lays down old grief, finds and loses new love, and changes paths as he sets out on an odyssey to find himself and his place in the world. This well-written coming-of-age epistolary explores important truths about the transition from childhood to what comes after in a style reminiscent of J.D. Salinger. With a poet’s eye for detail and language, William Walsh has given us a story worth reading and remembering." —Raymond L. Atkins, author of Set List and Sweetwater Blues
“Lakewood is a wonderful novel, filled with the joys and suffering of a young man who agrees to house-sit during the summer of ’73 in the home where he grew up. Told in the pitch-perfect voice of a college student, it is filled with the pain of memory and hope for a new life. This is a strong, poignant story that will hold your attention like a secret room.” —Philip Lee Williams, author of Far Beyond the Gates
- GenresAdult
258 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 4, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 8, 2022
William Walsh’s Lakewood is a perfect read for this summer—or for anytime. It harks back to 1973 as an 18-year-old decides not to go home to Atlanta but to spend his first summer after college in the local town, Lakewood, NY, on Lake Chautauqua. Post-Watergate, Nixon in still in office, attempting to end the war in Vietnam. Hank Aaron is on the way to besting Babe Ruth’s home run record. And the Supreme Court has just decided Roe v. Wade. Things are changing—fast. The book’s main character has been described by others as Holden Caufield-like. I can only say that Walsh puts us deep in the head of a young man with the sensibilities of a young writer together with the messed up decision-making powers of a late teenager. Coincidentally, the house-sitting job that Bob English arranges puts him in the home he and his parents left after the accidental death of his twin sister a dozen years before. Not wanting to go home to Atlanta, and not telling his parents about the house, he sits the house and two large St. Bernards and tastes the college professor-owners’ extensive library. Bob reads Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a complex but controversial novel, and quotes William Faulkner in his writings in a daily journal, the structure of Walsh’s novel. Bob begins writing his own novel, but not much time passes before locals are showing up at his door and changing his solitary life.
As the narrator is 18, the professor’s taste in cars has a kind of predictable effect, and, suddenly, Bob is out of next semester’s tuition. He scrambles for a job to rebuild his father’s fund for school. He falls in love, scratching the hurt that followed a relationship that had died, absurdist-style, just before his arrival at college. In the meantime, the townspeople pop up in “Lakewood,” and we get to know the familiar and the strange around him, and he connects with and is bathed in the spirit of his sister, finally forgiving himself for her accident. Bob’s quest for sex and relationship and a clear path for the future drive the story forward. And all the while, there’s neuropsychology, which describes the adolescent’s brain development as a step behind the hormonal. The result is a story that’s rich in character development, packed with the nostalgia of youth, especially if you remember or like the early seventies, and full of the crazy happenings of the age.
Several years ago while on a book tour that took us from Cleveland to Syracuse and DC, my companions and I stopped at an Interstate highway rest stop that overlooks Lake Chautauqua, and we were fascinated by the view over the lake and the towns of Lakewood and Chautauqua, site of the famous Institute with amazing cultural offerings. At another time, I’d been driven through that town with its famous 1800’s era homes spilling over wide lawns. Lakewood, it seems, has a similar appeal, representing old-fashioned summers for New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania residents nearby. I loved visiting the locations again through Walsh’s novel. He captures with the poet’s eye the detail of the lake towns and creates a world made up of the currents of the time—baseball, politics, the sexual revolution under way. Director of both the Creative Writing and low-residency Master of Fine Arts Writing programs at Reinhardt University, he is an accomplished poet and author of books about Southern writers. With Lakewood, he shows his exceptional skill in long-form fiction as well.
As the narrator is 18, the professor’s taste in cars has a kind of predictable effect, and, suddenly, Bob is out of next semester’s tuition. He scrambles for a job to rebuild his father’s fund for school. He falls in love, scratching the hurt that followed a relationship that had died, absurdist-style, just before his arrival at college. In the meantime, the townspeople pop up in “Lakewood,” and we get to know the familiar and the strange around him, and he connects with and is bathed in the spirit of his sister, finally forgiving himself for her accident. Bob’s quest for sex and relationship and a clear path for the future drive the story forward. And all the while, there’s neuropsychology, which describes the adolescent’s brain development as a step behind the hormonal. The result is a story that’s rich in character development, packed with the nostalgia of youth, especially if you remember or like the early seventies, and full of the crazy happenings of the age.
Several years ago while on a book tour that took us from Cleveland to Syracuse and DC, my companions and I stopped at an Interstate highway rest stop that overlooks Lake Chautauqua, and we were fascinated by the view over the lake and the towns of Lakewood and Chautauqua, site of the famous Institute with amazing cultural offerings. At another time, I’d been driven through that town with its famous 1800’s era homes spilling over wide lawns. Lakewood, it seems, has a similar appeal, representing old-fashioned summers for New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania residents nearby. I loved visiting the locations again through Walsh’s novel. He captures with the poet’s eye the detail of the lake towns and creates a world made up of the currents of the time—baseball, politics, the sexual revolution under way. Director of both the Creative Writing and low-residency Master of Fine Arts Writing programs at Reinhardt University, he is an accomplished poet and author of books about Southern writers. With Lakewood, he shows his exceptional skill in long-form fiction as well.
January 9, 2023
It's an accurate depiction of a 19-year old kid with problems he's not equipped to handle.
I couldn't stop reading yet I was continually disappointed with the protagonist. It's unfortunate because I hate his decision-making, the way he refuses to acknowledge issues, and his consistent lack of self control. It's evident he wants to be a better person, but he just isn't. It was as if he was aware of the mistakes he's making yet continually makes his situation worse.
But I still root for him. I wanted to see him succeed despite his shortcomings, though he has a lot to learn before he will be happy.
The ending was a slap in the face where he's forced to at least acknowledge the consequences of his own actions, but they're left unresolved. I should have seen it coming. One underlying theme was the concept of realism and how reality is not a clear cut journey to the destination, but instead a multitude of events in random sequence until the end. It is up to one's perception to create a narrative and assign meaning to events and objects, and Walsh does a tremendous job making this book feel like a retelling of real events that occurred instead of a novel.
Frustrating and abnormally written, but I wish more people read it.
I couldn't stop reading yet I was continually disappointed with the protagonist. It's unfortunate because I hate his decision-making, the way he refuses to acknowledge issues, and his consistent lack of self control. It's evident he wants to be a better person, but he just isn't. It was as if he was aware of the mistakes he's making yet continually makes his situation worse.
But I still root for him. I wanted to see him succeed despite his shortcomings, though he has a lot to learn before he will be happy.
The ending was a slap in the face where he's forced to at least acknowledge the consequences of his own actions, but they're left unresolved. I should have seen it coming. One underlying theme was the concept of realism and how reality is not a clear cut journey to the destination, but instead a multitude of events in random sequence until the end. It is up to one's perception to create a narrative and assign meaning to events and objects, and Walsh does a tremendous job making this book feel like a retelling of real events that occurred instead of a novel.
Frustrating and abnormally written, but I wish more people read it.
October 10, 2023
In 1973, Robert English decides not to go home from college for the summer, but instead is house-sitting for a professor and his wife, coincidentally in the house where he used to live as a child, until the accidental death of his twin sister. Robert, a typically self-absorbed nineteen-year-old, decides to keep a daily journal of his time. The author nails the college-student voice as Robert makes one stupid decision after another and deals with grief, love, and consequences of his actions. I loved the descriptions of popular books, TV shows, music, politics, and popular culture of the time; it was a nice stroll down memory lane, since I, too, was in undergrad in 1973. Others have commented that the main character has sort of a Holden Caulfield quality, and I agree. A lot wasn't tied up at the end, which I suppose is realistic enough. I would have liked a bit more of a conclusion, but it wouldn't really have worked for the book to end at any other time. I enjoyed it.
October 24, 2022
For those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 70s, Walsh's (note the misspelling of the author's name of this Goodreads edition) novel is a nostalgic walk down memory lane. It is a classic coming of age story using as a format the personal journal of the protagonist, Robert English (nothing meaningful about that name, right?), which mostly works well.
The author offers plenty of signposts from the early '70s to provide historical context for the unfolding events. Although Walsh also came of age during this same period and probably has fond memories of the period, I get the sense that he spent a lot of time on the Web or with resources like newspapers.com to get exact details surrounding events that Robert English mentions in his journal. Most of these tidbits add very little to the plot and can even get distracting, but getting down into the minutia is a skill that has served Walsh well in much of his academic work over the years -- respectable work, I should add. His study of John Huston's film adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood is amazing.
Some readers will walk away from this novel thinking that Robert English is a confused young man trying to come to terms with his passions and desires, somewhat reminiscent of characters created by Philip Roth. Other readers will decide by the end of the book that the protagonist is a misogynistic jerk. Either way, Walsh can tell a good story, and Lakewood definitely falls into that category.
The author offers plenty of signposts from the early '70s to provide historical context for the unfolding events. Although Walsh also came of age during this same period and probably has fond memories of the period, I get the sense that he spent a lot of time on the Web or with resources like newspapers.com to get exact details surrounding events that Robert English mentions in his journal. Most of these tidbits add very little to the plot and can even get distracting, but getting down into the minutia is a skill that has served Walsh well in much of his academic work over the years -- respectable work, I should add. His study of John Huston's film adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood is amazing.
Some readers will walk away from this novel thinking that Robert English is a confused young man trying to come to terms with his passions and desires, somewhat reminiscent of characters created by Philip Roth. Other readers will decide by the end of the book that the protagonist is a misogynistic jerk. Either way, Walsh can tell a good story, and Lakewood definitely falls into that category.
September 30, 2023
A self-absorbed 17 year old boy spends a Summer coming to grips with life.
July 11, 2024
You have a 17 year old thing to be his own, working on growing up.
April 23, 2025
@goodreads maybe spell the author's name correctly?
July 24, 2026
So boyish, so American (both in a positive note)
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews