Summertime by the shores of bigotry

Author: By Jodi Daynard

Date: SUNDAY, June 7, 1998

Page: C2

Section: Books

Cheer in literature is even worse. After all, one expects a con job from an advertisement or salesperson: If the whitening toothpaste fails to win us love, it's no great shock to the system. But isn't literature supposed to tell us -- however cloaked in make-believe -- the awful truth?

``The Inn at Lake Devine,'' Elinor Lipman's fourth novel, initially strikes one as too cheerful by half, especially if one considers that it's subject matter is anti-Semitism in America. When the novel opens it's the early 1960s, and Natalie Marx, a 15-year-old Jewish girl, is experiencing bigotry for the first time: Her mother has just received a rejection letter from the proprietor of a Vermont resort, the Inn at Lake Devine. ``The inn,'' writes Ingrid Berry to Audrey Marx, ``is a family-owned resort which has been in continuous operation since 1922. Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles.''

After such a beginning, one expects from ``The Inn at Lake Devine'' at least a modicum of pain and cruelty, suffering and humiliation. But instead, Lipman quickly steers her narrative course into more benign waters. What follows is, in fact, a humorous and ultimately uplifting story that's less about anti-Semitism than about the power of youth to transform old mores.

While unable to go to the inn with her parents, Natalie nonetheless connives a trip there as the guest of her friend Robin Fife and Robin's more acceptable gentile family. On this first trip she briefly meets the Berry children -- handsome, 16-year-old Nelson, his younger brother, Kris, and annoying little Gretel. Although these meetings hardly make an impression at the time, the relationships that evolve between the children will come to provide the novel's central focus.

The trip to the Inn at Lake Devine quickly satisfies Natalie's curiosity about how the ``other half'' lives. Ingrid Berry is the nightmare we expect her to be, a pinch-faced, artless bigot with ``gray-blond hair shortened to a Jackie Kennedy bouffant.'' But the rest of the people at the inn seem nice enough, and Mr. Berry is a genuinely kind, bashful man who ``blossomed into a low level of jolliness, especially around kids.''

Lipman casts a mild eye on anti-Semitism in America, perhaps far too mild. But it works in the context of her novel precisely because Natalie's experience of the Berrys, and of the inn, is mixed in a way that rings true. One scene between Robin and Natalie in particular captures Lipman's gentle optimism. Before arriving at the inn, Natalie asks Robin what kind of people go there. `` `Boring people,' said Robin. `People who don't even use the dock half the time.' '' Natalie asks what they do instead, and Robin replies, `` `They sit in big chairs and look out at the water through binoculars. Stuff like that. They're old.' ''

The inn's clientele as Robin describes them are the picture of harmless dotage. Indeed to Natalie they sound ``more peaceful than anti-Semitic. After all, ``old Jewish people liked to sit in lawn chairs and stare out at the water, too.''

The scene between Robin and Natalie speaks to the novel's ulterior motive: not to cast a blanket of blame over these people but to ferret out their common humanity. The dialogue between the girls also sends us a subliminal image of the inn itself: At once a world so old and set in its ways that it will never change, and also a world on the point of extinction, for which change is inevitable.

A decade passes before Natalie finally returns to the Inn at Lake Devine, for the wedding of Nelson and Robin. Natalie is no longer a cowed Jewish girl but a self-possessed young woman and professional chef. The inn is no longer ``restricted,'' though Ingrid hasn't changed much. But a tragic event prevents the wedding from taking place, and Natalie finds herself seeing both Nelson and Kris with new eyes. Will Natalie and Kris fall in love? Will tight, snooty Ingrid get her comeuppance? While not earth-shattering, there's an elegance to Lipman's simple plot; it tugs at one like a gentle undertow.

Toward the end of ``The Inn at Lake Devine,'' a clever device casts Nelson and Kris as ``outsiders.'' They have wound up with Natalie at the Halseeyon, a Jewish hotel in the Catskills, where it is their turn to feel what it is like to be in the minority. But the Berry boys are affable kids, and learn the ropes of Jewish culture with good grace.

While perhaps too symmetrical, this plot development is emotionally gratifying. It also serves a necessary function: The Berrys' stay at Halseeyon brings them down a peg, renders them equals in Natalie's eyes in a way they had not been before. And only when they are equals can true intimacy become possible.

The democratization of what had once been an unequal society sounds like good fodder for the political scientist. But it is also an age-old hallmark of the comedic art. Kings masquerading as paupers, paupers becoming kings and everyone embracing in the end -- it's the archetypal stuff of comedy. Which is what, in the end, ``The Inn at Lake Devine'' is, a genuinely cheerful comedy, whose dead giveaway is its underlying tenet: that all the pits and bumps on life's road are, ultimately, navigable. At the end of the novel, as in much comedy, love triumphs over the forces of adversity, diversity triumphs over elitism. The novel's conclusion is a particularly gratifying auto-da-fe that celebrates the death of the inn's old order, and heralds the new.

And yet, despite its many good points, Lipman's novel left me yearning for more tension, to be more convinced that something important was ever truly at risk. Even comedy, after all, needs its share of discomfort, those moments that tremble at the edge of grief and which, once safely in the past, transform humor into comedy, happy endings into joyous ones.

``The Inn at Lake Devine'' is a pleasant, feel-good book that artfully describes the ascendancy of youth over age, progress over backwardness. It is, perhaps, too optimistic, its victory too neatly achieved. But, like all good comedy, it also offers hope to even the hopeless pessimist: that every so often in life a stray felicity will yield up good reason for cheer.