For years, Emily and Henry Maxwell spent their summer vacation at the family’s lake cottage in Chautauqua, NY. The tradition continued even as their children, Ken and Meg, reached adulthood and had children of their own. Now Emily, recently widowed, has gathered everyone for one last week together before the cottage is sold. Wish You Were Here shows a family dealing with the losses of both Henry and the summer experiences that shaped them as a family.

Ken, married to Lisa, has suffered a career setback. Meg is a recovering alcoholic in the middle of a divorce. Ken and Meg each have two children of similar age, ready-made summer playmates. Henry’s sister Arlene is also part of the group; she and Emily have become particularly close since Henry’s death. The family’s week is filled with all of their usual summer activities–swimming, tubing, miniature golf, ice cream–but these are just part of the setting. In some ways, nothing much happens; just when you think there’s going to be drama, the situation settles back into equilibrium. At the heart of the story are the relationships every member of the family has with one another, and the emotional current driving their actions. I enjoyed watching this unfold and seeing how their week at the lake affected each member of the family. ( )

First published twenty years ago, this is the kind of timeless story that could just as easily take place fifty years ago or last week. And because it's written by Stewart O'Nan, it's beautifully written. It's an ordinary story of an extended family's last time together at the family lake house. Each family member is going through their own stuff and there's all the family dynamics that emerge when adult siblings are together again. O'Nan is unparalleled at writing about the complex and unique lives of unremarkable people and here he has a lot to work with, from the never-married aunt whose life was always full as a public school teacher, discovering loneliness in retirement, to a pre-adolescent boy full of fear of what might happen. The stand-out scene from this book is his -- finding the courage to ride an inner tube being dragged behind a boat and having it tip over -- such a routine event but written about with empathy. O'Nan had me rooting for each and every member of this family, even when they were in conflict. I'm so glad he chose to write a few more books about the Maxwell family. ( )

Many extended families gather along a lake or a seashore for a few days each summer. It's usually fun for everyone involved, but is there enough in such a family vacation for a novel? Stewart O'Nan thought so, and in 2002 he published “Wish You Were Here,” not just a novel about a week at the lake but a 517-page novel.

The family is the Maxwells, the subject of other O'Nan novels. Henry and Emily Maxwell have taken their family to their cottage along Chautauqua Lake in western New York for many years. Now Henry has died, and Emily gathers her family for one last week at the lake before she sells the cottage. Family members include Arlene, Henry's never-married sister; Kenneth, Emily's son, his wife Lise and their two children, Ella and Sam; and Margaret, Emily's daughter, and her children, Sarah and Justin.

This week at the lake never develops much more of a plot than any other family's week at the lake. Early in the week Kenneth stops for gas soon after a young female attendant at the gas station disappears, presumably kidnapped, and this thread weaves through the novel now and then, but it never turns into a crime novel. The closest O'Nan comes to an actual plot is that nobody in the family wants to lose the beloved cottaged, but only Emily can afford to pay the taxes, and she doesn't want the responsibility. Yet that is hardly enough to sustain 500 pages.

But we keep reading. There is something compelling about a family's attempts during a mostly rainy week to find things to do that will keep everyone amused. It is all familiar somehow, much like our own lakeside family reunions.

The author offers the point of view of each of the nine characters, switching from one to another. Each person is loving part of the family, yet we see that each is secretly petty, selfish and even somewhat vindictive. Unacknowledged conflicts rage beneath the surface, sort of like in most families. Only the two boys are young enough to allow their true feelings to come out in the open. Disciplining them amounts to teaching them to hold those feelings inside like the adults do.

The novel, while never riveting, nevertheless proves interesting enough to keep the pages turning. The missing woman does not turn up, and other problems remain unresolved as well. Emily is still lonely. Kenneth still can't make a decent living from his first love, photography. Margaret, just divorced, still wants to drown her depression in drink. Lise still worries that her husband has more to say to his sister than to her. Ella still has a crush on her prettier cousin. And so on. Family vacations usually don't solve problems. They just give us a break from them, or in some cases just bring them out into the open.

For many years my own extended family spent weeks each summer in a cottage along Chautauqua Lake, so O'Nan's many references to places along the lake — such as the Lenhart Hotel, the Bemus Point ferry, the Book Barn, the casino, etc. — made this novel especially appealing to me. It made me wish I were there. ( )

O’Nan’s hefty novel is proof positive that an engrossing, encompassing read doesn’t have to include international spies, doomed spacecraft, intricate heists, or high-speed car chases. There are no superheroes here, no monstrous villains – just a group of people related by blood or marriage, who come together for one last week at the summer home which is being sold after multiple generations of the Maxwell family have made memories there.

The narrative follows the quotidian tasks of surviving a week in close contact with multiple generations of an extended family. What are we eating, who is cooking it, who has to do the dishes? What do we do when it rains and the youngest generation is antsy and bored? Anyone who has ever endured a family reunion, particularly as an in-law or adolescent, will recognize the endless jigsaw puzzle, board game, enforced family fun events as excruciating chores, occasionally tinged by grudgingly acknowledged – if fleeting – moments of incandescence.

But it’s also an incisive look at nine people whose pasts and futures, needs and wants, have interlocked in a towering Jenga of love and resentment, memory and loss, struggle and acceptance. And every one of them, from retired teacher Arlene, seeing her brother’s widow cavalierly parting with a property that by rights should be half hers, to eight-year-old Justin, struggling with his parents’ divorce and the heavy burden of always being the baby of the group, gets their POV moment. The characters run true and deep, rubbing against each other in the lakeside cabin, sorting through the keepsakes and deciding what to take and what to leave behind as they prepare for this watershed event in all their lives.

A satisfying, juicy read, regardless of the season. ( )

Reading this novel out of published order (last instead of first), and so hard on the heels of the third in the trilogy, Henry Himself, is a bit too much of the Maxwell family of Pittsburgh in the 1980s. Emily, Alone (the title of the second novel), matriarch and widow of Henry, is still infuriatingly persnickety, permanently angry, and harsh to her children. They all make their annual trip to Lake Chautauqua, NY under the cloud of it being the final summer in the ancestral family vacation home, which Emily is reluctantly selling against the wishes of daughter Margaret and son Ken. The freshest character is granddaughter Emma, who develops a crush on, and yearns for the life of, her prettier cousin Sarah. O'Nan's ability to take on the point of view of almost every single family member is remarkable, but their thoughts are generally fairly commonplace and even banal, which perhaps hits a bit too close to home in this era when we all feel obligated to stretch ourselves into the territory of the exceptional. ( )