On Mystic Lake

Nick becomes Annie’s primary love interest, and his more compassionate approach serves to demonstrate just how much her previous marriage was lacking. As the novel opens, Nick is entirely consumed by guilt, grief, and shame. He understands the negative effect this has on his only child, Izzy, but he is not yet strong enough to face it. Instead of trying to make things better, he drowns his feelings in alcohol and is not present for his daughter. He relies on other people to take care of Izzy even though he knows this is one more way he is failing his daughter. For Nick, the worse he feels, the more he drinks to hide away. No one has been able to help him when the novel begins.

Nick is not a weak man, however. His strength is shown both through the childhood hardships he overcame and through his fight to overcome alcohol addiction and the trauma of his wife’s death. Unlike Blake, he wants to be the father his daughter needs. His mother was an addict and was also hateful and abusive toward him. After his mother’s death, he was taken in by a man named Joe. Despite all of the trauma he experienced as a child, he was able to craft a decent life because of Joe.

After Kathy’s death, he needs someone to tell him what he needs to do, and once that becomes clear to him, he is able to follow a path toward recovering from alcohol addiction; ultimately, he is able to become the father that his daughter needs. Annie tells him that he is making his daughter suffer and that he must stop, and at that moment, he has her drive him to a hotel and he starts AA, the program Joe already directed him to. Through this process, he heals himself enough that he can come back to Izzy. Thus, he serves as a foil to Blake, who is never able to overcome his own selfishness or other flaws in order to be a good father to his own daughters. Nick, on the other hand, succeeds in overcoming far darker demons in order to be a good father to his own daughter.

Izzy is Kathy and Nick’s daughter, although her mother has died by the time the novel begins. She is a six-year-old girl whose main psychological task in the novel is to overcome the trauma of losing her mother to suicide and losing her father to depression and alcohol addiction. At the beginning of the novel, she is no one’s priority. Nick gets Lurlene to care for her, but Lurlene has her own job and cannot be a full-time mother to the girl. At the beginning of the story, Nick is emotionally distant and has a hard time looking at Izzy because she reminds him of her mother and his own failures.

Izzy initially processes her losses with the belief that she herself is slowly disappearing. This belief is not something she consciously chooses, but she feels powerless to overcome it. Because she is six years old, she cannot clearly articulate her motives or her feelings, but because she tells her mother that she is trying to get to her and because she believes her mother has disappeared, it can be logically assumed that she is trying to disappear in order to join her mother. She stops talking as well. While she wants to talk to her father, she is afraid that if she talks about her mother, her mother will disappear further. Finally, when she feels secure in the knowledge that her father will be present for her and that her mother will always be watching over her in some capacity, she finds her voice again. In these ways, she is able to reverse her disappearance and find healing from her trauma. Likewise, taking care of her helps to heal both Nick and Annie.

Blake is Annie’s husband. He is very successful financially, and he likes demonstrating this through outward signs such as a big desk in his office and a large ring on his wife’s finger. He wants his wife’s appearance to reflect a sense of his wealth and success. As the novel opens, his primary character trait, selfishness, is illustrated when he leaves his wife for another woman, Suzannah, on the same day that their daughter leaves the country. Annie wants to talk more about it and fight for the marriage, but he wants nothing more to do with her. Still, he agrees to give her three months before filing for divorce. Ultimately, he believes that his needs are more important than Annie’s. She gave up her life to take care of her family, and as such, she does not have much in her life besides her family. By contrast, Blake’s mistress, Suzannah, is a junior partner at his firm and is very ambitious. He believes, therefore, that Suzannah can make him happier than Annie does.

However, Blake fails to take his own selfishness into account, for his primary desire in a relationship is that his partner will take care of him. This is what ultimately leads him to lose both women. He no longer wants to be with Suzannah when he realizes that she has her own priorities that often supersede his extensive needs. Similarly, when he temporarily gets back together with Annie, she is no longer as willing to play that role. She cares for their home, but she stops picking up the slack for him. She lets him fail with his daughter on her birthday. She allows him back into her bed, but she stays far to the side. When his wife most needs him, during the neonatal ICU stay of their newborn daughter, he is not there for her because being in the hospital is too difficult for him. After this, he and Annie learn that their relationship will no longer work—both because she cannot get what she needs from him and because she is no longer willing to do everything for him. In the end, he does not grow as a character, and he loses everything because of his greatest character flaw. He is not willing to sacrifice anything to get Annie or his children back.