Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club

Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the source text’s treatment of infertility, pregnancy loss, child death, abuse, racism, sexism, and anti-gay bias.

Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club looks at four generations of mothers and daughters in the Miller-Prager family: Betty, her daughter Florence, Florence’s daughter Mariel, and Mariel’s daughter Julia. These relationships are fraught. Florence initially dislikes her mother’s propensity to insistently make the best of bad situations, something she later regards as Betty’s strength. Mariel blames Florence for her difficult childhood and for the death of her son, Gus, though ultimately reconciles with her. Julia grows up without her mother, yearning for connection to a woman she didn’t get the chance to know. The novel’s narrative structure, in which daughters narrate before becoming mothers themselves, focuses on what it means to be a daughter, the text nevertheless offers a view of motherhood that is both burdensome and full of joy.

These burdens and joys are not felt equally by all characters, which the novel positions as a function of choice. Florence’s relentless anxiety about her daughter’s safety is only partially tied to Florence’s personality (which tends toward selfishness that she rationalizes as being, ultimately, for the benefit of others).