Maine Characters

Vivian, the slightly younger daughter of Hank Levy, is one of the novel’s dynamic protagonists. She is the product of Hank’s marriage to Celeste, and she was born six months after Lucy, the daughter he shares with Dawn Webster. Vivian is a New Yorker who prefers the chaos of the city over the idyllic, dilapidated charms of Fox Hill and its lake. Her admission of the lake’s beauty is initially grudging at best. When she first meets Lucy, the half-sister she always suspected she had, “[t]he shock […] simmer[s] under her skin, ready to boil over” (4). Vivian is high-strung, exacting, and prone to anger, and she considers grudges to be her “love language.” Vivian is resentful of her father, but she is also sometimes afraid to face the possibility that she has also made mistakes that negatively affected her relationships. In the recent past, when she confronted Hank with her suspicions about his infidelity on Father’s Day, he denied them and followed her from the restaurant. Fearful that she might be wrong, she ran away rather than learning that she allowed her suspicions to ruin their relationship, and she never got the chance to reconcile with Hank because he died of a heart attack later that day.