Review of In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien (Penguin, 1994)
By
Doc Scorpion
Once upon a time, a politician named John Wade lost an election by a landslide. Afterward, he and his lovely wife Kathy decide to vacation in a lakeside cottage on Lake of the Woods, Minnesota. One day, John wakes up to find Kathy gone. When she does not return, the police investigate the disappearance. Did Kathy simply decide to leave John without telling anyone? Did she go for a doomed boat ride in the night? Did John have something to do with her disappearance? Or are there other possibilities? And why does John have nightmares about his tour of duty in Vietnam?
Such questions are the basis for Tim O’Brien’s 1994 novel In the Lake of the Woods. And if you’ve read any of O’Brien’s other works, you can probably imagine that easy answers will not be forthcoming. O’Brien is a writer who is fascinated by the imagination, by the world of dream, by the tapestry of narrative, and by the way these three are interconnected. In the Lake of the Woods is a novel that explores this connection as it plays out in the lives of John Wade and the people whose lives he touches. Part character study, part mystery novel, and part investigative casebook, the novel approaches its plot on little cat feet, creeping near it and casting only the most shadowy sidelong glances.
Along the way, O’Brien raises many questions and seems less concerned with providing concrete answers than with suggesting possibilities. I’m sure there’s a paper here about how his narrative approach mirrors poststructuralist critical thought, but I’m not going to write that paper just now. Instead, I will simply say that his approach lends itself to wonder, both in the characters and in the reader, and I mean “wonder” in all the nuances of the word—curiosity, awe, mystery.
To those that argue that nothing really happens in the novel, O’Brien might just answer that this, too, is a possibility. He seems to be speaking not only of his novel but also of postmodern literature in general when he writes
The human desire for certainty collides with our love of enigma. And so I lose sleep over mute facts and frayed ends and missing witnesses. God knows I’ve tried. Reams of data, miles of magnetic tape, but none of it satisfies even my own primitive appetite for answers. So I toss and turn. I eat pints of ice cream at two in the morning. Would it help to announce the problem early on? To plead for understanding? To argue that solutions only demean the grandeur of human ignorance? To point out that absolute knowledge is absolute closure? To issue a reminder that death itself dissolves into uncertainty, and that out of such uncertainty arise great temples and tales of salvation? I prowl and smoke cigarettes. I review my notes. The truth is at once simple and baffling . . . Everything else is conjecture. No answers, yet mystery itself carries me on.
And the mystery of this novel will carry you on, from the first page to the last. If you curl up bed with John and Kathy Wade, your preconceptions will likely find themselves gliding under the waters of Lake of the Woods, or across its surface in little boats, or lying in the bottom of a ditch outside a burning village in Vietnam. And in O’Brien’s world, such places are exactly where preconceptions belong. The stories that he tells are highly personal, but they all come back, in one respect, to what Faulkner called the human heart in conflict with itself.
Come open this book and look into the heart of John Wade, as seen through the lenses of those who thought they knew him. This journey isn’t traditional or formulaic, but rewards lie hidden for those who care to look.