"Kohnstamm delivers a blistering, clear-eyed, and sure-footed debut novel about the perils and pitfalls of misdirected ambition. More than that, Lake City is a hilarious and sneakily incisive examination of the cultural tensions and widening class divides that simmer on the fringes of an increasingly homogenized Seattle—or San Francisco, or Brooklyn, or Los Angeles, or any other American city in the throes of affluenza and gentrification." —Jonathan Evison, author of Lawn Boy
The setting is Seattle's Lake City neighborhood during the 2001 holiday season. In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy and at the peak of Seattle's first wave of tech-boom gentrification—a wave that never quite made it to his neighborhood—Lane Beuche schemes how to win back his wife (and her trust fund). In his childhood bedroom in his mother's decrepit old house, the idealistic but self-serving striver Lane licks his wounds and hatches a plot.
He discovers a...