Eden Lake

One of the more “cherished” childhood myths is the camp experience. Whether scout, day or sleep-away, kids are told camp is good for them. In other words, conformity is good. Yet the memory is polarizing. As with Star Wars vs. Star Trek or Super Mario over Donkey Kong, there is no in-between. Adults either loved or loathed every minute of it. And this former camper never saw one that looked like Matt Dillon did in Little Darlings.

One of the more “cherished” childhood myths is the camp experience. Whether scout, day or sleep-away, kids are told camp is good for them. In other words, conformity is good. Yet the memory is polarizing. As with Star Wars vs. Star Trek or Super Mario over Donkey Kong, there is no in-between. Adults either loved or loathed every minute of it. And this former camper never saw one that looked like Matt Dillon did in Little Darlings.

The fictional Camp Eden Lake will remind readers of their own experiences but that is one of the many strengths of Jane Roper’s Eden Lake. Her absorbing debut novel takes camp culture an imaginative step further by looking into the lives of Eden’s Lake’s founding family—the Perryweisses. Roper knows that owners and directors are always great gossip among campers and staff. Camp Director Clay Perry and second wife Gail (a former dance counselor) die in an accident a few weeks before the season begins. Oldest son/former camp hottie Abe becomes acting director. Daughter/onetime bitchy camper Jude returns as drama counselor and is implausibly put in charge of a bunk of adolescent girls. Stepdaughter/once poor counselor’s kid Aura works in the office. Youngest son Eric, the only one with physical and emotional ties to Eden Lake, is groundskeeper. Clay’s ex-wife and Eden Lake co-founder Carol Weiss lost interest when she lost her husband to her former best friend Gail. Carol looks and acts like an omnipresent campfire ghost, a role she clearly relishes and readers will too.

Going through the grief process and re-connecting with each other while running a business for young charges makes it a truly life-changing summer for the siblings. Their relationships are played out against an inflexible schedule of activities. While this helps them as a family unit, Roper makes a two-edged observation. Structure is important but it is also a way of guaranteeing the status quo. Camp Eden Lake may have been founded in 1968 as “a vision of what the world might be if everyone lived in harmony with each other and with the land” but will forever be a six-week summer stopover for rich kids. Abe recognizes this in a fantastic chapter about a first day on the job:

They came bearing overstuffed duffels and enormous wheeled suitcases, tennis rackets and riding helmets, fishing rods, and yoga mats. Some carried milk crates and laundry baskets full of miscellaneous gear – electric fans, CD players, stuffed animals. One girl got off the New York bus carrying a bright pink inflatable chair, which, according to the counselor who’d chaperoned the trip, had been inflated by being passed around the bus, each kid blowing into the thing until they got dizzy.

This gently sarcastic point is taken further when Roper separates key episodes with flyers printed in courier font chronicling the camp’s official history. These artifacts, like those readers find when going through their parents’ crumbling files or fraying scrapbooks, include Eden Lake’s nontraditional mission statement and a camp newsletter interview with Clay portraying him as the ultimate father figure.

Chapters are named after the Perryweiss under discussion. Jude emerges as the most complex. Her role as keeper of family secrets made her a bitter, aimless adult and Eden Lake’s most compassionate character. Whether or not homeschooling benefitted her or Abe is left for the reader to decide. Regardless, Jude is the anti-Eden Laker whose unsuppressed memories return nonstop:

She was a quick study. She learned how to roll her eye and say “duh!” the way they did, and joined in when they ranked boys on their cuteness and kissability. She started shaving her legs and wearing makeup to evening programs. On trip days when they went to Camden or Boothbay Harbor, she bought rubber bracelets and Tiger Beat magazines and did whatever else seemed like the normal, acceptable twelve and thirteen-year old girl things to do (Not going into the galleries and looking at the paintings by local artists; not browsing in the bookstores or sitting by the harbor looking out at the boats, imagining what it would be like to sail around the world in one.)

All this angst plus the staging of Eden Lake’s production of Annie to worry about too!

Eden Lake’s ironies are reflective but not entirely humorless. The grown Perryweiss children are joined that summer by beguiling Russian counselor Masha, ex-camper turned sleazy entrepreneur Brendan Baker playing on Abe’s indecision about Eden Lake’s future, a camper named Niedermeyer who is nothing like the Animal House character who shares his name, and campers who attend Abe’s Free Speech sessions. They make camp fun. So does Jane Roper. Going to an imaginary place can be better than a real one.