Not Just a Lake, but a Fountain of Memories

There are evenings that follow days of rain when the clouds and foggy weather clear and the last blue sky of the day brings with it a new air that smells of mountains and forests and lakes. These are clearings that exist powerfully in our memories and return to us at the taste of a madeleine or, in Mark Slouka’s case, the smell of a fish.

Slouka’s first collection of fiction, “Lost Lake,” is, in a way, his “A La Recherche Du Lac Perdu.” In the course of a dozen stories, his narrator drifts back and forth between childhood memories and present-day encounters with a certain lake in the Catskills. Many of these stories are fish tales, stories of giant carp with scales the size of silver dollars and ancient fishermen with Old World patience.

But Slouka’s landscape is an immigrant’s landscape. The narrator’s parents were born in Czechoslovakia. The lake itself, with its 28 seasonal cabins, has become a popular destination for a “motley group of Irish and Italian Americans . . . Poles and German Jews” and, above all, Czechs, some who immigrated after World War II, some who left after the brief 1968 Prague Spring. And so the book is seasoned with Bohemian folk tales as well as baseball lore, Fennimore Cooper by way of Kafka.

The best, “The Exile,” tells of Marie and Josef Kessler and the scandalous interlude their summer at the lake brings to the little community. Josef Kessler is a distinguished man, a former presidential advisor and lecturer at Masaryk University in Brno. His wife, Marie, 25 years his junior, married him only a year before they had to flee their country, one step ahead of a coup. Now a mature woman in her 40s, she and the 70-year-old Josef have come up to the lake where the 14-year-old narrator is summering with his parents.

The Kesslers blend into the communal routine of martinis and Nixon, until one morning Marie is awakened by the sound of diving: “the two-part concussion of the body hitting the water, the chest and arms followed a split-second afterward by the feet slapping down. Curious, she sat up in bed.” Out the window, she sees a swimmer swim a few strokes, roll over on his back, squirt water through his teeth and finally return to the float tethered off-shore. “She watched him shake his hair like a dog, then throw himself on the wood warming in the sun.

“From the porch she could hear her husband’s dry chuckle, three puffs of air escaping the nose, no more. ‘Youth will be served,’ he said.” Served it is, and inevitably his wife is the main course.

Yet the narrator, remembering the scandal 30 years later, imagines with wonder this woman who had left her native country “without seeing her parents or her brother or her things, the village or the woods or the ponds she’d known.” At the end of the story, the narrator comes upon Marie and her lover safely hidden in the long grass. In a glorious revelation, the narrator marvels as “Marie Kessler placed her hands on the small of her back and sat up straight into the moonlight. And who but those who have never risked the visible world for dreams half done and gone, could ever hate or blame her?”

“The Exile” is a wonderfully lyrical story, and Slouka’s lyrical ambitions are enormous. Yet those very ambitions are, perhaps, his worst enemy. His prose frequently suffers from a severe strain of Swinburne syndrome, alliteration littering his stories at every turn. “Some say the soul tempered by fire--tortured true--is the better for the trial,” begins the first story of the collection. Within the next two pages, we have a “hidden heart,” a “great glancing body” and the memory of “the broad bend of his back beneath his shirt.” And this is only the beginning,

There is a reason that this kind of writing went out of style with the last century. Its preciousness distracts; the odor of verbena it emits not only clogs the nose but also stifles any response to story or character or meaning. Slouka is too good a fisherman not to reel it in next time.