An entire neighborhood full of people is racing to tell us about a shocking divorce in “Lake Effect” and, in the dazzling final sentences of the book, we finally understand who they are. All of them.

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s bestselling “The Nest” was about adult siblings, bickering over an inheritance, and “Lake Effect” also has to do with badly behaved grown-ups, money and love. The first half is set in the late 1970s in Rochester, N.Y., where the adults (and, secretly, many of their children) are digesting the lessons of “The Joy of Sex.” Finn’s marriage to Honey, and Nina’s marriage to Sam, are both joyless and sexless, so it’s perhaps inevitable that neighbors Finn and Nina find their way to each other, in between potlucks and the high school plays of their children.

Sweeney details the impact of their pairing from multiple perspectives, including all four spouses and their adolescent offspring. The brief, funny chapters introduce an awful lot of voices but their points of view are so different (Nina and Sam’s daughter Clara, for instance, hates everyone, so she stands out.) that we get a bead on everyone quickly. “Lake Effect” is set about 15 years after TV’s “Mad Men” but it feels similarly revelatory in its depiction of how much has changed, particularly for women — who, in “Lake Effect,” still are determining if they get to have orgasms and jobs.

Work is one area of ‘70s life Sweeney doesn’t capture particularly well. We’re meant to see that Rochester is under the sway of giant companies such as Xerox, where Sam works and begins to form a secret life, but that culture doesn’t really register in the novel. Neither does Nina’s side hustle as a food columnist, a promising subplot that disappears faster than a bread cube drowning in a cheese fondue.

“Lake Effect” primarily is interested in the behavior of its vivid characters, who mostly refrain from telling each other about their feelings and motivations. Readers will have guessed, for instance, that Sam is gay long before anyone in the book does — because we read from the benefit of distance and without the restrictions the Jimmy Carter era placed on these people.

The struggle is real, as becomes clear when Nina, long estranged from Clara, finally tells her daughter why she did what she did, 20 years after we wish she had explained it: “Life is full of options, even if the world tries to tell you it’s not. I wanted you to believe in choice, to trust your desires.”

One thing all of the competing voices in “Lake Effect” make clear is that a choice can ripple throughout a community. But Sweeney does not present her characters’ decisions as if they’re part of a zero-sum game. When Finn leaves Honey, their lives are both improved, even if their offspring don’t see that until many years later. Everyone in Sweeney’s big-hearted book is given choices and those tiny, blink-or-you’ll-miss-it opportunities add up to extraordinary lives.

Lake Effect

By: Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney.

Publisher: Ecco, 273 pages.

©2026 The Minnesota Star Tribune. Visit at startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.