Product Description

It's 1962 and all across America barriers are collapsing. But when Natalie Marx's mother inquires about summer accommodations in Vermont, she gets the following reply: The Inn at Lake Devine is a family-owned resort, which has been in continuous operation since 1922. Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles. For twelve-year-old Natalie, who has a stubborn sense of justice, the words are not a rebuff but an infuriating, irresistible challenge.
In this beguiling novel, Elinor Lipman charts her heroine's fixation with a small bastion of genteel anti-Semitism, a fixation that will have wildly unexpected consequences on her romantic life. As Natalie tries to enter the world that has excluded her--and succeeds through the sheerest of accidents--The Inn at Lake Devine becomes a delightful and provocative romantic comedy full of sparkling social mischief.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #470994 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-27
• Released on: 1999-04-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.com Review
In the early 1960s, a Massachusetts family suffers a polite awakening. Inquiring about summer openings at a Vermont inn, the Marxes receive a killingly civil response, which ends, "Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles." Apparently the Marxes are not quite as ideally average as they thought, at least on the basis of their surname. So begins The Inn at Lake Devine, Elinor Lipman's disarming and very funny exploration of the power of pride and place. Natalie, the youngest Marx daughter, will literally spend years responding to this rebuff. At first she taunts the innkeeper, Ingrid Berry, by phone and mail, stressing by exaggeration that a system which welcomes WASP wife-murderers but not famed convert Elizabeth Taylor is both unfair and inane. In 1964, our Anne Frank adept even goes so far as to send off a copy of the newly minted Civil Rights Act: "Who knew if I'd ever exchange another letter with a documented anti-Semite?" she asks. "Just in case no one ever insulted me again--in this land of religious freedom and ironclad civil rights--I employed the big gun I was saving for future transgressors: 'P.S.,' I typed and underlined: 'In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.'"

The next summer Natalie manages to engineer an invite to Lake Devine, coming in on the coattails of Robin Fife, a good-natured, none-too-swift fellow camper whose family are regulars: "We all wanted to cross the threshold as guests and not visitors, and maybe I, in my early-teen disguise, was best suited to be a spy in the house of Devine. It was our duty to show that we--with the blood of Moses, Queen Esther, Leonard Bernstein, and Sid Caesar coursing through our veins--were the equal of any clientele." But by the end of her stay, Natalie is fed up with the Fifes' relentless good will and Mrs. Berry's covert ill will. All in all, she is relieved to return to firm social ground, and doesn't devote much thought to her "Gentile ambitions" for the next 10 years. A letter about a Camp Minnehaha reunion, however, brings Robin back into the picture, and Natalie is again invited to Lake Devine--this time for her campmate's marriage to the eldest Berry son.

But enough plot summary. The Inn at Lake Devine is full of sweet and sharp surprises that would be churlish to reveal. Lipman offers up sparkling scenes of serious social mischief, explorations of identity, delicious food (though a deadly mushroom lasagna momentarily clouds the picture), and a wedding party or two. All this and a pair of the menschiest WASP brothers in literary history--not to mention phrases such as shnook, shmendrick, and shmegege--make The Inn at Lake Devine the perfect, provocative comedy.

From Library Journal
A story of Jews and Gentiles, this very funny novel begins with a segregated inn in Vermont and ends with all the characters getting their comeuppance. In its skewering of assimilation and cultural diversity, it is reminiscent of Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land (LJ 3/15/96), only here Lipman uses Christians, not Chinese, to tweak social consciousness. Natalie Marx is shocked when, in response to an inquiry, her mother receives a note from the proprietor of the Inn at Lake Devine baldly stating that the guests who feel most comfortable there are Gentiles. Natalie inveigles an invitation from a friend to go to the inn and thereby sets off a lifelong fascination with breaking the rules. Both entertaining and thought-provoking, this delightful new work is highly recommended for all fiction collections.?Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In 1962 the Marx family of liberal Newton, Massachusetts, is politely discouraged from vacationing at a placid Vermont resort by a thinly veiled response to the innocent inquiry about accommodations, stating that the "guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles." Experiencing her first taste of overt anti-Semitism, 13-year-old Natalie Marx becomes instantly obsessed with the Inn at Lake Devine and the seemingly bigoted family that owns and operates it. Wangling an invitation from friends to stay with them at the inn one summer, Natalie embarks on a humorously enlightening 10-year odyssey, entangling the course of her professional and romantic destiny with the lives of Ingrid Berry, the rigidly implacable proprietor of the inn, and her two naive and attractive sons, Nelson and Kris Berry. Skillfully interweaving the bittersweet narrative with threads of both tragedy and comedy, Lipman displays a healthy amount of empathy and affection for her flawed and slightly eccentric cast of characters. Margaret Flanagan

Customer Reviews

Charming
I fell madly, totally, and completely in love with the heroine of Elinor Lipman's The Inn at Lake Devine.

Natalie Marx is around twelve when the short novel opens, and her family has just received a politely worded rejection letter from the proprietor of the Inn at Lake Devine: there are no rooms at the inn for people with Jewish names. The first half of the book recounts Natalie's comic attempts to visit the inn, her real but limited success, and the interesting people she encounters along the way.

The second half of the book concerns the twenty-five-year-old Natalie's re-introduction to the inn and her romance with the innkeepers' son.

As always, Lipman's characters are quirky, yet true to life. They respond to real life situations in real ways, yet Lipman's compassionate eye for the comic shines through.

Slight but charming
I picked up this book for a paper I was writing about modern Jewish heroines. It wasn't a great addition to my paper, but it was a quick, charming read that would be great for a beach, a plane, or a rainy day.

Our heroine is a cooking student who is scarred by an incident from her childhood in which a resort--the titular inn--refused to allow her family to stay there one summer because they were Jewish.

The premise seems heavy, but the execution is not. While the novel does concern the heroine's need to go back to the inn (where she once stayed with a childhood friend and her family), this is not a serious treatment of anti-Semitism or interfaith relationships.

What it is--and what it does well--is detail the fumblings and failures of several families--Natalie's, her childhood friend Robin's, and the Berrys, who own the inn. The end result is a Jane Austen-lite comedy of manners: funny but without the biting wit or satire. The book drops the ball on some of the issues (in particular, Natalie's interfaith relationship with a member of the Berry family is too neatly resolved considering what has come before it), but what it does do, it does well.

An endearing, easy read.

A True to Life Treasure
I really enjoyed reading The Inn at Lake Devine. I could really relate to Natalie as both a child and a young adult.

Who hasn't felt like an outsider without really understanding why. This novel touched on so many different feelings - anti-Semitism, love, grief and so much more.

From Natalie re-uniting with her childhood friend from camp to her relationship with the family at the inn (I don't want to ruin anything for those who haven't the book yet) - let's just say that her relationships are complicated.

This was a fun read from start to finish and I definitely plan to read more of Ms. Lipman's work.