In the Lake of the Woods

Read this one for book club. Best discussion we've ever had.The book jacket is all about a northwoods mystery, but much of the book - the set up and psychology - is historical fiction Vietnam, specifically the My Lai massacre. It's a fascinating read with whole chapters of quotes from investigators and whole chapters of speculation. I've never read anything like it. Genius author! Hard read emotionally. But so spot on. Want to understand the Vietnam war? Read this book.

A good drama. Thought-provoking and insightful about trauma and war. I can’t say it is a satisfying mystery, but to explain I would have to leave spoilers. That would be rude.

John Wade, running for the U.S. senate, receives a crushing defeat when a dark secret he has kept hidden for nearly twenty years, suddenly sees the light. Wade and his wife flee to the deep woods of northern Minnesota, to escape the public eye and try to repair and renew their lives. Shortly after arriving, his wife mysteriously disappears from their lakeside cabin.
This is a dark and disturbing tale, especially when the reader discovers, that Wade's secret, was that he was a young soldier, involved in the My Lai massacre, told in a series of horrifying flashbacks.
The story becomes a tangle of mystery, illusion and secrets, with the Lake of the Woods being a perfect backdrop, for these deceptive and destructive themes. O'Brien is a fine writer, who also seems to be wrestling with his own demons of war.

Tim O’Brien won himself a jumbo shrimp bucket of acclaim for this book, as he always does when (and only when - remember when he tried to write a sex comedy and the general reaction was “why did you do that?”) he writes, somehow or other, about the Vietnam War. Indeed, our hero seems to have staked out territory as the country’s literary conscience when it comes to that war. Which is just as well, as it didn’t amount to much more than a massive prolonged waste of human life, both American and, as is often forgotten in these parts but certainly isn’t by O’Brien (not to mention Vietnam’s Duong Thu Huong, I mean have you read Novel Without a Name? There’s a book that sticks with you), Vietnamese. Incidentally, it’s exactly the lack of writerly consciences that terrifies me about the increased privatization of the military… what with so many wars hashed out by a goon squad hyped up on Call of Duty and The Expendables, accountable to no one but rich kids like Erik Prince (one of many who makes me feel ashamed to be from Michigan) who always wanted to play soldier-boy, I mean what the hell do we do? This isn’t to say we go back to strapping rifles to the backs of kids who graduated from high school two months prior, of course, but that’s exactly the point, there are no winners here, maybe… we could… learn to resolve conflicts without the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands?????????????

Nah, gotta keep those military-industrial dollars rolling in. Who needs roads and schools and libraries when we can just buy another bomber and blow intelligence and promising young Afghanis into oblivion.

And hey, O’Brien is a pretty good writer. He wrote The Things They Carried, for the love of the heathen gods! That counts for something in this world. Have you read it? If not, please do. It’s got psychological complexity and multifacted relationships and wide-reaching implications and good sentences and the metafictional tricks that kind of sink O’Brien’s ship here. The stuff of a worthy read, in other words. I’m not sure if I can say the same for Lake of the Woods, alas. I know the Boston Globe called it “a relentless work full of white heat and dark possibility,” and my response to that is thank you, Boston Globe, for putting a bunch of words on a page. If that’s a polite way of saying “hot mess,” well, high fives abound. The plot summary is pretty simple, so I’ll get that out of the way. Failed senatorial candidate John Wade, a Vietnam vet with an atrocity in his past, goes to a cabin in northern Minnesota with his wife to recoup from the loss. She disappears shortly thereafter, and he sets out to find her.

With the plot out of the way, let’s talk about that white heat and that daaaaaark possibility. My opening bid: this book is a mess from a structural perspective, and it’s the structural messiness that blows the whole damn thing up. You’ve got chapters told in sustained scenes, whether in Minnesota or Vietnam. These mostly work. But then you’ve also got chapters that spatter-paint exposition all over the goddamn place, and you’ve got chapters that speculate about Kathy’s fate through one of the most utterly painfully why why why-style perspective this side of Vollmann’s awful “I, the narrator! I, Big George!” Critical Craft Failure from You Bright & Risen Angels, and you’ve got some oral history, which I find compelling because I find oral history compelling from a structural point view, but then you’ve got footnotes that promise a first-person narrator, and, well, it’s a lot. I’ve seen these grab-bag structures work in other novels, whether Ulysses or Human Acts or even The Things They Carried if you want to call that a novel. What distinguishes them from this is the sense of purpose. Joyce and Kang and a younger O’Brien were clearly gong for something, and they clearly pulled it off. This O’Brien seems to just kinda jam it all in there because what the hell, and you just gotta have more of an answer than that.

Let’s talk first about that exposition. On the one hand, I like the detail of Wade being super into stage magic. It might not quite have the thematic payoff I’d like it to, but it’s a unique detail, and it gives Wade a little humanity. The problem lies more in the other segments, particularly those with his father, who is distant and disapproving, and it’s implied that Wade’s need for that sort of fatherly love is the driving force for his political career and also his general shittiness. Which, I mean, what fucking crackerjack box did O’Brien pull that out of? I’d argue a cliche is a cliche more in its execution than its intent, and by that marker (which, yeah, subjective, but it’s my review! Whose subjective opinion do you think you’re getting, the Pope’s?), the father’s a cliche. And it’s because O’Brien pivots so quickly between the fragmented exposition that Daddy-O never seems like more than a bunch of Disapproving Dad tropes slopped together, which in turn affects John Wade, who seems like a cliched Daddy ISsues protagonist in way too many places. Kind of like Skip Sands from Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke. I obviously don’t move for striking parent-child relationships from the literary record, since I still think there’s a lot to mine from the topic, but it’s a vein writers have mined a lot, and we must apply more care to how we mine. Else we risk losing the valuable stuff.

Big problem #2 comes from the perspective of craft, and specifically how writing becomes sloppy. A handful of chapters hypothesize what might have happened to Kathy, and they do so in one of the strangest and most aggravating third-persons I’ve ever seen, one that alternatively claims to be authoritative and speculative. I can understand the notion of the speculative voice imagining what Kathy’s inner thoughts would be. It only gets wonky when the hypothetical voice gets into Kathy’s past. My question is whether the past is real or hypothetical past for a hypothetical Kathy in this given moment, and at that point it’s all too up in the air. I generally dislike the “welp, postmodernism means that nothing matters” argument, but I kinda feel like this particular book closes in on this point. All this murk, and where does it point? In the end, it also reduces Kathy to a somewhat empty character, since I mean, what do we know about her that’s real? She’s just this husk who disappears, and with all her personality traits are placed in the same realm of speculation as her fate, she doesn’t become much more than the engine for the rest of the plot. Which flattens out her character, reducing her to the trope of “woman who something bad happened to that reflects the bad thing that happened to a man.” I think O’Brien was trying to interrogate this trope by rounding Kathy out, but as the rounding-out only occurs in the realm of speculation, we know nothing more about her at the end of the book than we do at the start of the book. Put it another way, the author shouldn’t be guessing as much at a major character’s personality as I, the reader, am.

The book seems to move most confidently through the oral history chapters, and I have to wonder why O’Brien didn’t just choose that as his format for the whole thing. After all, here’s where he gets to do everything he’s trying to do. The quick cuts, the overlapping theories as to what happened with Kathy, the jumps into John’s tenure in the military and his childhood and his troubled marriage and his disaster of a Senatorial campaign. He even successfully injects the metafictional aspects of The Things We Carried, having an unnamed narrator (whom I presume to be the same Tim O’Brien authorial persona we saw in Carried) occasionally make his own comments on the commentary, from his own perspective as a Vietnam vet. Don’t get me wrong, Tim O’Brien wrote the book he wrote, and I’d hate to impose too much of my own aesthetic on this work. My problem is less that he didn’t pick this particular direction and more that he didn’t commit, and in not committing spread himself too thin, and in spreading himself too thin found himself too often in the void that is cliche.

Still, credit to O’Brien for trying. This book doesn’t work, but laziness sure isn’t the culprit. It doesn’t work because O’Brien tried out three major formal gambits - four if you count the decision to alternate between the three with more traditional sustained-scene type fiction - and only really pulled off one. I can’t deny I came away unsatisfied, but someone had to try this sort of thing out, right Because that’s the whole point of the creative thing, to make something unique, and this book is certainly that, whatever else my complaints may be. Like so many other works before it, it’s a noble failure, and that at least is something. Even if it is a discombobulated mess that’s often sloppy from a craft perspective. That’s the thing about experiments, sometimes the mystery green liquid cures cancer and sometimes it just melts your table.

Or maybe books full of white heat and dark possibility just don't do it for me.

It took me a long time to get through this book. I think the structure (mixed chapters of events, “hypotheses,” and evidence) made it easy to pause at various points. Nevertheless-I love O’Brien’s writing. I love the footnotes and I love the theme of the bittersweet agony of never knowing anything fully.

Among the glowing review snippets in my paperback copy of this book is one from Harper's Bazaar, calling it a "postmodern thriller." As much as I generally have a knee-jerk hate reaction to anything labeled "postmodern" or "experimental" (I blame Don DeLillo for this), I think that description is accurate and yet I really enjoyed this book.

On the surface, this is the mystery of what happened to the wife of failed senatorial candidate John Wade. After a scandal from his past service in Vietnam surfaces (the story is set in 1986) and permanently torpedoes John's political ambitions, John and his wife Kathy retreat to a cabin on the Lake of the Woods in Minnesota, broke and broken. Soon Kathy disappears and suspicion immediately falls on John. Although many details are different, this book reminded me a bit of Gone Girl: lots of musing on the fun house mirror of identity and what happens when a spouse's reaction doesn't align with what the socially mandated face of grief should be.

If you need a mystery that ends with Professor Plum in the conservatory with a whatever though, this isn't the book for you right now. O'Brien is interested in a lot more than a mystery tale here, and he writes beautifully even when he's writing about war, which you know if you've read his other, more famous works.

It is by the nature of the angle, sun to earth, that the seasons are made, and that the waters of the lake change color by the season, blue going to gray and then to white and then back again to blue. The water receives color. The water returns it. The angle shapes reality. Winter ice becomes the steam of summer as flesh becomes spirit. Partly window, partly mirror, the angle is where memory dissolves. The mathematics are always null; water swallows sky, which swallows earth. And here in a corner of John Wade's imagination, where things neither live nor die, Kathy stares up at him.

There's also a lot of ambiguity in the story, by meticulous intent.

I'm still not sure how much of the story was "real" and how much was speculation on the part of the unnamed narrator, which made me consider the realness of fiction and the fiction in fact just as the characters do. He also used an actual historical event in Wade's backstory, mixing real and fictional characters (I'm still a little ambivalent about this choice, frankly. Partly because it was confusing, and partly because I wasn't sure whether the My Lai massacre should have been used as a plot point, although it was done with finesse and thoughtfulness. Maybe it wouldn't have had the same impact if the real thing had been rendered into a thinly veiled fiction.)

(He's also a Vietnam vet-he served roughly around the same time as my Dad-so maybe it's not my place to say what he can or can't write about.)

Highly recommended, at any rate.

Tim O’Brien makes me want to be a writer, not because his writing in any way inspires me, but because he makes me think writing isn’t so difficult at all, clearly any asshole can do it. That sounds harsh for as much as I enjoyed this book, I both enjoyed it and at the same time thought it wasn’t very good. You know who would love this book? Caris. Enough said.

So what’s the book about? Kid of an alcoholic father uses magic and illusion to cope, goes to Vietnam, witnesses horrifying massacre, falls back on the art of illusion to hide himself from the world, twenty years later in a bid for the Senate his history comes to light and while hiding out in the lake of the woods he wakes up one day and his wife is gone. Did he kill her? In the end there are no answers only various possibilities.

Tim O’Brien only spent one year in Vietnam. Why did I feel disappointed when I read that? My first thought was ‘shit, that’s like me writing five books about that year in high school I worked at Radio Shack.’ There are probably a lot of similarities between Vietnam and Radio Shack, so many in fact that I need not list them here.

So what’s the book about? The nature of memory, the secrets that we keep even from ourselves, the possibility of every really knowing another human being or even your own mind. You know who would hate this book? Justin. Enough said.

"If all is supposition, if ending is air, then why not happiness?"

I am still marveling at the construction of this book, and in the wholly original, but still somehow not-gimmicky, inventions of this book: the multiple evidence and hypothesis chapters. The quotes, which do seem to be random and distracting at first, make a point on their own, a point we have to construct for ourselves, about war, and sanity, and disappearance, and mystery, and the nature of truth in biography.
I will skip the obligatory Tim-O'Brien-as-Vietnam-chronicler praise. I have known this to be true since the first time I read "The Things They Carried," and nothing of his has ever changed my mind on that.

There are some slow places in this novel, for sure, places where his elegant prose runs away from my attention, but that's a matter of a paragraph every now and then, and it wouldn't have been bothersome at all, except that the book's driving force was so driving, I just wanted it to keep going.
The things that people seem to dislike, I liked. His parents weren't fully formed characters? Think about how dull and pointless over-developing them would have been. He repeats some passages? I just keeping thinking about how different they feel the second or third time.
I know someone who is annoyed by the hint-dropping that he does early in the book, referencing Kathy being missing, the flies, a few other things. To me, these seemed a natural part of the book, but I understand how someone could see them as contrivances.

It isn't a perfect book, of course, but it is a good one. I read this in a day, and it's not an easy book to read sometimes. There are several shudder-inducing pages, some things that I can't get out of my head. I also think it's important to know before starting the book (as I did, from reading the back) that the fate of Kathy remains unknown. We aren't being driven through the book by our desire to know where she ended up. There are other driving forces, unlikely ones, character-based, nuanced ones.

The next time someone tells me they hate books with indeterminate endings, I'm going to give her a copy of this and see if this can change her mind.