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Marguerite By the Lake

This week, Don reviews "Marguerite By the Lake" by Mary Dixie Carter.

In 2021 I reviewed “The Photographer” by Mary Dixie Carter, not a Southerner, because she was the daughter of Dixie Carter of “Designing Women” and the stepdaughter of Hal Holbrook, brilliant impersonator of Mark Twain, the father of Southern literature.

In “The Photographer,” a creepy novel, the protagonist, an emotionally damaged young woman, and brilliant photographer, insinuates herself into an architect’s family, meaning to live there, belong there, and have the husband for her own. I loved it.

“Marguerite by the Lake” bears a great many similarities. The protagonist, Phoenix, 35 years old, after a traumatic, poverty-stricken youth in posh Connecticut, is a master gardener, and a great deal of her work is at Rosecliff, the estate of Geoffrey and Marguerite Gray. The lawns, gardens, etc. are perfection.

In their home, hanging over the mantel, is the painting, “Marguerite by the Lake,” worth 5.5 million dollars. The subject is the lady of the house, in her youth, on that lawn overlooking that lake. I thought of Wyeth’s “Christina’s World.” This painting is fantastically famous, second ONLY to the Mona Lisa in the number of times it has been photographed, reproduced, and so on.

Marguerite Gray, I would say, is modelled after Martha Stewart; Carter mentions Stewart in the novel, but I took this as legal cover. It’s her all right. Marguerite is perfect at everything: how she dresses, interior decoration, flower arranging and, of course, gardening, but she actually knows nothing about gardening. Phoenix does the gardens and Marguerite takes the credit, in books and on Facebook, where she has five million followers.

Well, this becomes intolerable to Phoenix, and she becomes resentful. She also develops a craving for Geoffrey Gray, the restless husband overshadowed by Marguerite. Geoffrey is described, in Phoenix’s words, as a romance hero: he smells like pine needles and mint, arms “golden brown,” chest and abdomen “ivory,” “like an Italian marble statue,” “light blue eyes,” “lips soft and warm.” Nota bene: there is more to learn about Geoffrey.

Things move along, as you might expect, and one day Marguerite, in the company of Phoenix, falls, perhaps, off the cliff at the end of the garden. Soon Phoenix moves in. But THAT means she has to live with the painting. The eyes of the Mona Lisa follow the viewer around the room; this painting seems to change colors, emit odors, speak, but only to Phoenix, who is an emotional mess anyway and may have a guilty conscience.

Taylor, Marguerite’s beautiful, spoiled and angry daughter, definitely thinks Phoenix killed her mother. The police are suspicious. I think Phoenix herself is uncertain, and the remainder of this gothic, creepy novel is told from inside the mind of an increasingly paranoid, disturbed woman who is certainly not reliable. It’s lots of fun.

Don Noble , Ph. D. Chapel Hill, Prof of English, Emeritus, taught American literature at UA for 32 years. He has been the host of the APTV literary interview show "Bookmark" since 1988 and has broadcast a weekly book review for APR since November of 2001, so far about 850 reviews. Noble is the editor of four anthologies of Alabama fiction and the winner of the Alabama state prizes for literary scholarship, service to the humanities and the Governor's Arts Award.