On Mystic Lake

As the novel opens, Annie is having a crisis because she has no identity without people to care for. She tries to cope with this discomfort by surrounding herself with her possessions, and this desire demonstrates her lifelong compulsion to build a hollow, outward-facing life without any internal cohesion. When she starts to worry about who she really is, her first impulse is to seeks refuge in things because her interior resources are so depleted. Like many upper middle-class couples, the Colwaters have built their lives around the accumulation of wealth. Blake spends much of his time making it, and Annie spends much of her time managing it. When all of the people she generally cares for depart in a single day, she is finally forced to acknowledge her internal emptiness, and her psychological challenge throughout the novel is to rebuild the parts of herself that have disappeared throughout her years of caretaking. While she has yet to learn The Futility of Trying to Change People, she will soon take the first steps toward changing herself for the better.

Annie’s propensity for people-pleasing becomes apparent when she cannot understand why her strategy of putting everyone else before herself has caused her marriage to fail. At this point in her life, Annie believes that to be a good wife and mother, she must always put other people’s needs ahead of her own. This approach has been her default mode ever since she first met Blake, and she believes that this strategy makes her an ideal wife, mother, and partner. It has not, however, been enough to keep her husband’s love or his loyalty. Her resulting emptiness and sense of failure lead her into a psychological crisis that will force her to reconsider the attributes that make a person both a good partner and a good mother. At this point, she has no definition except eternal sacrifice, and so she is at a loss as to what she could have done differently and what she should do now that she has no one for whom to make sacrifices.

The most obvious differences between Annie and Suzannah point to one area in life that Annie has neglected: ambition. Blake is attracted to the adventurous, assertive aspects of Suzannah’s personality, for although Annie gave up her own ambitions to spend her life taking care of Blake and Natalie, Suzannah has maintained her own boundaries and has pursued a career. In fact, she is a junior partner at the same firm that Blake works at, demonstrating that she is good at her job and ambitious in her pursuits. This makes Blake believe that Suzannah is more intelligent than Annie is, and he respects Suzannah’s personal pursuits more than he respects Annie’s endless sacrifices for his sake. Because Annie gave everything to Blake, he did not have to pursue her or compete with any outside interests. It is the fact that Suzannah has outside interests, however, that partially attracts Blake. In this way, what Annie thought was most important in a marriage is precisely what made Blake decide to leave, and this demonstrates that The Bonds Between Friends and Family are often based upon far different criteria than those that society has programmed women like Annie to emulate.

One key motif that recurs in the novel focuses on the various ways in which people disappear. When Annie looks at her family pictures, for example, she feels as though she does not exist. She does not exist in the pictures because she is always the one taking them, and this pattern emphasizes that she is not the protagonist of her own life, but merely the observer, for she has long since relegated herself to the limiting role of facilitating and documenting the lives of others. In this way, the photos are a physical representation of what she believes she has allowed to happen to herself. Just as she tries to surround herself with possessions when she is unsure of who she is, now she is starting to understand on an even deeper level how empty she has become inside. She does not take this information and just tuck it away, however. She wants to fix it, and this decision demonstrates her strength of character. She has taken good care of her husband and her daughter and has competently managed their daily life together and their significant estate. The question that remains at the end of Chapter 3 is whether she will be able to use these same strengths to develop a new life for herself.