Lake Effect

The book recounts the author's years growing up in the 1980s in Glencoe, a Chicago suburb, and subsequently his student years in New Orleans, but really centres on his best friend Jamie. It is evocative of the period and full of memorable imagery. Jamie is an extraordinary and delightful character, and the remarkable platonic friendship he and the author Rich enjoy is beautifully recounted. This is a book which repays careful reading, not one to be hurried. It reveals much insight, and while the end is far from negative, I experienced a feeling of great sadness and yet tremendous warmth as the book drew towards its conclusion. A thoroughly rewarding book, highly recommended.

Very interesting, perceptive, and often funny writing style. Cohen can write "thumbnail sketches" of people and sitations as well as anyone I've read lately. (His short riff on a summer of bad jobs is a good example, wherein he sums up his bad bosses in a sentence or two, and you still "get" what kind of people they are.) In short, highly recommended.

Rich Cohen's book is terrific. It is easy enough to be read in one sitting. However, I would recommend taking your time--like the summer idylls he describes in the book. The prose is easy going, but at times it is beautiful. Talking about writing his memories of childhood Cohen says, "On the page these memories becamne stories. In this way, they were preserved and destroyed, taken from my mind and fixed in place. Never again could they haunt me in quite the same way." Indeed, this what the book partially does for Rich Cohen. It is also about friendships and in reading about them, I could hear the songs of Harry Chapin. That was music I listened to with my friends from the North Shore (although I was a city boy) about a half decade after Cohen left town. He is lyrical about growing up. He is also honest. He captures the essence of leaving behind your childhood. He never claims that things happened exactly as he puts them down on the page--there are no claims of objective truth. He writes beautifully of his own memories and in that he transcends the facts. His growing up was different than some readers (drugs, etc), but it makes the feelings no less universal. I hesitate to make the comparison of Cohen's book to some of Bob Greene's work. Greene's work is about a different generation that is often remembered by it's own members. Greene tends to remember things in an innocent, nostalgic way, whereas Cohen has a harder edge honesty about his work--a raw quality that fits his persona. However, what strikes me about both Chicago writers is that they both love the world that created them. They honor memories. There is much to be said for that. Cohen is giving voice to Generation X in a way that few writers have (it is about time someone wrote about us in this way). He is normal kid who is not confessing about his prozac nation, some sad abuse, or any of the other shocking claims of memoirs of Gen X. Cohen loves his friends. His friendships were filled with hope, love, and dreams. Jaime may be a lot like Ferris Bueller, but I think he was real. So is Cohen and so are his memories.

& #65279;This is the perfect end-of-summer read, full of bittersweetmemories and the mixed joys of growing up and away from theplaces and people who initially shaped the way you view theworld. We've all probably known someone like Jamie and even dated a Sandy, and if we're lucky, drunk foamybeers by a cool lake in the summer and spent hours talking aboutmusic because it mattered and then moved on but felt a littleempty and alone and not quite grown up. Cohen weaves all hismemories into a sharp, funny and fundamentally moving story. Ihighly recommend this book.

Cohen is brave and funny (he's the kind of explorer who makes jokes about termites when the mast breaks) and he's grabbed a topic that's tough and delicate at the same time: How do our friends make us who we are? Do we go after friends to become the kinds of people we'd like to be? The big question -- the "Lake Effect" Cohen's talking about -- is how did we become us? It's an act of personal anthropology, and that's the book's first level: we pull one thing from one friend because we know it's what makes them cool, we drop another thing off of our personal menu because we see it's knocking out the other guys, we pick movies, books, TV shows and records and experiences and situations because that's the pile of stuff we want to climb on top of to look at the world from. Cohen spends his time picking the exact right moments; it's a series of discoveries and firsts, the Lewis and Clark stuff of expeditioning into what will become our lives: first parties, first beers, first girls, first jobs, first cars, and he pushes himself to find the exact right items. I don't think I ever understood the exact personal growth potential of a first hangover untl I read "The Lake Effect."But, as I say, that's only the first level. The real thing here is atmosphere. Elsewhere, Cohen has given us hints about his life -- he's used metaphors from a pretty standard suburban upbringing to nail down the feel of entirely un-standard situations. (Describing, in "Tough Jews," the electric chair in terms of its non-Barcalounger comfort, or his relatives, in family vacation snapshots, "looking determined to have fun." In "Tough Jews," he explains crime, which first generation immigrants climbed as their entry into the American economy but which they talked their own children away from, as "a ladder they pulled up after them." ) Here he goes inside out, and that suburban life is the whole book, and he makes you feel it. He seems to have compressed a whole book out of the things we've forgotten. It's almost a dare, as if Cohen was walking behind us throughout our childhoods picking up stuff, and it turned out our memories had holes in their pockets. Here's something you forgot. Here's something else you forgot. Here's one more thing you didn't remember. And now here it is in my book. The atmosphere is of bidding time until you can get to be an adult and go out there, and of the kids knowing it and appreciating it. The feel is of sensation and luck. The visuals of a bonfire by the beach --- the orange and floating sparks, and the lap of the water -- and the sound of girls laughting and the grainy aluminum-can sips of beer. He puts you back there, as sure as time travel, and makes you remember how pleasantly, thrillingly unimportant it felt. He makes you remember how most of adolescence pretty much felt like a summer weekend. And he reminds you of the friends who helped you see that's what it was.Cohen's best friend Jamie, who helps him understand this, get