Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-9

Chapters 10-14

Chapters 15-21

Chapters 22-23

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 22-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 22 Summary

Julia narrates in 2000-2014.

Julia’s first memory is of the July 4th fireworks when she was three. She likes the end of the noise and lights, preferring quiet. She likes taking walks in quiet winter mornings and dislikes summers, which she spends with her father at Floyd and Betty’s Lakeside Supper Club. Eager to participate in the business, Julia begins doing odd tasks at eight, her father saving half of her pay for her college fund. When she is 10, Ned tells her that she will inherit the restaurant when she is 21; he only owns it in trust until she becomes old enough. She thinks back to her memories of her mother dying from lung cancer, and Julia’s childhood conviction that Mariel could not die if Julia remained at her side.

Ned promises he will help Julia run the Lakeside as long as she wants, which causes her to consider her father’s fundamental happiness when he tends the bar. Though she has heard stories of her father’s obsessive collection of baseball memorabilia and his sad years before her birth, she struggles to align these narratives with the man she knows.

When she is 15, Julia resents the Lakeside, associating its history of allowing smoking with her mother’s death. She begins foraging but finds that it detracts from the sense of peace she finds in the woods. She decides to learn distilling from Brenda and chats with Kyle while she waits for Brenda to return home. He lives in Minneapolis and has been connecting with the Korean and Korean American communities there. Kyle asks about Florence, still holding a vague dislike from the “Fort Florence” incident, which is a nonsensical tale of the past to Julia.

Julia and Florence are close; Florence makes Julia feel free from expectations about her future. Julia begins looking forward to shifts at the Lakeside again when Ned hires Julia’s best friend, Mina Grubbs. Julia is annoyed when Grubbs has shifts at the Lakeside on her 15th and 16th birthdays, which leads Julia to spend her birthdays at the supper club, too. When Julia and Grubbs go to the popular kids’ party after their shifts, they don’t like it and soon leave. By the time Julia turns 17, she and Grubbs have drifted apart, due in part to Grubbs’s relationship with Travis McBroom (Al’s great-grandson). Florence, who never comes to the Lakeside, visits for Julia’s birthday and cries happily when she sees a photograph of an elderly Archie Eastman visiting an elderly Floyd after Betty’s death.

Chapter 23 Summary

Julia narrates in 2015-present.

The summer Julia turns 18, two new businesses move into Bear Jaw, one a brewery owned by a local couple, the other a chain, Yucatan Lou’s, owned by Julia’s “mysterious aunt Carla” (339). Ned no longer knows how to get in touch with his sister, who has long since sold off Jorby’s; he has never met her children.

Julia is excited to get into Kenyon College in Ohio and is hurt when Ned reminds her that she could stay in Bear Jaw and run the Lakeside instead. Ned, sensing that Julia may want to sell the Lakeside when she gains ownership, urges her to learn to love the restaurant, like Mariel. The week before Julia leaves for college, Ned sends her home from the Lakeside on an invented errand. On the dining room table, she finds a basket with a Kenyon sweatshirt, a book on Ohio birds, and a note from Ned telling her how proud he is of her and that he’ll miss her. She sits and cries over the gesture. When she goes back to the Lakeside, she and Ned silently embrace.

The Lakeside is busy that evening, with anniversaries and birthdays promising good tips. Julia bumps into chairs and tables as she navigates the crowded space, thinking of how she lacks the grace of her father or Felix. She has an awkward interaction with Grubbs, who wishes her luck in college. Felix’s son, Brandon, now a famous hockey player, lures crowds as he celebrates his birthday. Julia admires Felix’s daughter, Sonia, who is becoming a librarian. Kyle, who now goes by the name Park Man-hee, comes in with his husband, Liam. Florence arrives with Brenda, who is Florence’s home health aide. Florence argues that if Julia really wants to honor Mariel’s memory, she should follow her own heart.

Julia and Ned drive to Kenyon. They talk and listen to music, but Julia worries that she is “truly breaking both her parents’ hearts” (351). When Ned leaves her at college, Julia cries. Despite missing Ned, she loves Kenyon and makes close friends, Angelica and Erin. She joins the outdoor program and enjoys exploring the woods. Julia struggles to feel a connection to Mariel even as she finds the rest of her life enriching.

When Julia inherits the Lakeside, she puts it up for sale and receives a generous offer. Ned, who is guaranteed a spot as bar manager even if the sale goes through, sighs that the Lakeside has felt different since Felix retired. Brandon’s professional hockey money provides for the whole family. Ned suggests that Julia approach Mary Sands, an old Lakeside regular who has opened a restaurant in the old Jorby’s location. It serves locally sourced food inspired by Indigenous recipes.

Julia decides to sell the Lakeside to Mary, happy that Mary plans to keep some of Mariel’s influence. When the new restaurant opens, Julia is impressed, but feels no connection to Mariel or the old Lakeside. One of the restaurant managers connects Julia to a potential job at the Minnesota State Forest Nursery, an ideal position for Julia. Ned, who happily bartends at a local dive bar called Crappie’s, visits the refurbished restaurant, relieved. Florence argues that it was Julia, not the Lakeside, who made Mariel who she was.

Julia graduates, surprised at not feeling her mother at graduation. She uses the proceeds from the Lakeside sale to pay off her student loans and buy a house. Her relative financial freedom allows her to volunteer for the county, doing tasks outdoors. She adopts a dog named Wally and wonders what to do next with her life. One evening, in the snow and quiet, she senses Mariel’s presence.

Chapters 22-23 Analysis

The novel’s final two chapters bring closure to various loose threads—even in cases where not all characters necessarily knew they were “loose.” Julia’s observation, for example, that Ned (who runs the Lakeside in trust for his daughter until she inherits at 21) is doing what he was “born to do” (236), is a tongue-in-cheek reminder to the reader about the oddities of life. Ned, as the once-presumed heir to the Jorby’s chain, was indeed born to run a restaurant. By the time of Julia’s comment, however, Jorby’s has been sold off; Carla, who inherited the restaurant chain instead, has been estranged from her brother for decades. Similarly, Julia’s decision to attend Kenyon College echoes Mariel’s earlier attempt to go to college in Ohio—a plan stymied by her mother, who removed her applications from the mail. Julia does not know of her grandmother’s betrayal—nor, the novel suggests, did Mariel ever find out. Yet Julia’s happiness at Kenyon nevertheless emerges as a form of consolation, in the text, for this past pain. The novel again thus offers readers extra interconnection that is not available to characters.

Julia’s struggle to connect to her dead mother offers another look at the difficulty of mothers and daughters to connect—here for an unsolvable reason—which is part of Shared and Unshared Intergenerational Knowledge. While this third generation of filial disconnect suggests that this problem is inherent in the mother-daughter relationship, the novel offers two points of optimism. The first is Florence’s connection to Julia. While Mariel was also close to her grandmother, Betty, little of this relationship happens on the page; with Julia and Florence, readers can see how the longer perspective of grandparenthood allows for a closer rapport between grandmother and granddaughter than between mother and daughter. Second, Julia’s hard-won sense of her mother in the Minnesota woods after she sells the Lakeside suggests that, even after death, a bond is achievable, even if imperfect (as with Florence and Mariel’s difficult reconciliation in the previous section). That this happens after the Lakeside has left the Muller-Prager family’s control means that the Lakeside is not necessary for the family’s connection; it was simply a temporary site of their bond.