Horrible. I was so disappointed. I bought this book because I saw O'Brien, who is otherwise one of my favorite authors, give a talk and he said he considered it his best book by far. That is just evidence that artists have no idea what makes them good.
"In the Lake of the Woods" has no movement. Entire scenes are repeated word for word. I get the impression that the author thinks their meaning will change with the new information he's introduced, but the problem is he forgets to ever introduce new information. The "Evidence" chapters are boring and lazy. The "Hypothesis" chapters are unbearable. It's not a mystery novel, because you basically know what happened within 30 pages, but he tries to leave it open-ended because he has no idea what he's doing.
There are good elements. There are some astonishingly good passages about the vietnam war and some breathtaking bits of dialogue, but I gave this book one star because I want to emphasize how important it is to your happiness that you do not read this book. Read "The Things They Carried" instead.

i think the book is honestly great, but i just have to rate it lower because the ending is so dissatisfying.

iiiiinteresting. I took ages to actually finish this book--I read several books in between--but still enjoyable in all.

D: «Lei ha obbedito agli ordini ricevuti?».
R: «Sì».
D: «Quali erano questi ordini?».
R: «Di uccidere ogni essere vivente».

Anche in questo caso è la forma che rende unico il racconto.

In primo luogo siamo di fronte ad un narratore non onnisciente che procede per supposizioni realtivamente al presente e al passato dei due protagonisti, John e Kathy, di cui sappiamo solo alcune cose, quelle che sono evidenti, o meglio quelle di carattere pubblico. Sul resto si naviga a vista. Perché quello che sta nel cuore dell'uomo, quello che è il suo sentire intimo rimane un mistero inconoscibile.

John e Katy, dopo la grave debacle elettorale, per riprendersi e ritrovarsi, si chiudono in un cottage sul lago del Minnesota. Il motivo della sconfitta elettorale riconducibile al fatto che John, durante la guerra in Vietnam, si è reso responsabile di crimini di guerra.

John, lo Stregone.

John, il bimbo bullizzato dal padre.

John, l'esecutore di magie.

John, il ragazzino orfano di un padre suicida.

John, l'uomo innamorato di Kathy.

John, che fa sparire le cose che non lo soddisfano o di cui si vergogna.

Kathy, la donna che per sopravvivere e sostenere la parte che la vita ha deciso di darle in sorte, a volte sparisce.


"Le scelte ci si aprono avanti come un tunnel, e noi sbuchiamo dove sbuca il tunnel."

Una lettura davvero sorprendente (e a tratti terrorizzante).

First, I have no idea how I hadn't heard of this book before a few months ago.

Second, I feel like I stumbled upon the key to a code. I suspect many authors writing today have read this. Even if they have not, they have been influenced by the structure of this novel, the pacing, the subject matter, the blurriness between right & wrong, & between wanting the truth & wanting to forgive. Reading this was like reading Lord of the Flies: once you do that, you see the bones of it in every story that comes after it. (So again, see the first point.)

Third, it's quite serendipitous that I read this immediately after finishing An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Some of the same sources are cited there as were cited by our unknown narrator here. I was primed for this book in a way I couldn't have predicted or planned. Reading about how our culture of war devastated the Indians was tough; following that by reading how it also devastates our own people is mind-boggling.

Finally, this book is so cleverly layered that I can't really do it justice with a review. My head is still spinning from it all. But let me say this: you know what happened to Kathy. You don't want to believe it, because it's too hard to believe it. It's too hard to believe because you already believe he loves her, & there's plenty of evidence for that. Perhaps there isn't enough evidence to convict him, but you still know it's true. Because it's too hard to believe people could commit an atrocity like the My Lai massacre... But you know that they did. So you know what happened to Kathy. To indulge in any other fantasy that denies that truth, no matter how tempting O'Brien makes it sound, is ultimately to deny the truths of our country's violent past. That's something that happens every day, by good honest citizens. Yet I think O'Brien is asking us to wake up. Like John calls out to Kathy as he treks north, alone & despondent, O'Brien is calling out to his readers. Listen up.

So very well done, Mr. O'Brien. Every page was a pleasure. I hope they're teaching this in school everywhere - it is stunning on every level.

Haunting; and there are glimpses of clarity surfacing amidst fleeting wisps of the horror and depravity of the Vietnam war when John and Kath go to escape in the yellow cabin on the shore of the vast Lake in the woods. Tim O'Brien's delivery of the gut wrenching details and aftermath of My Lai chills to the bone.

When you read this book, dig two graves - one for yourself, another for the death of innocence.

We know it’s going to be a dark read from the first chapter, “How Unhappy They Were,” and that the hours are counting down until Kathy would be gone, but we can’t know how far below the bottom of the Lake this story will go. I faltered on the way down both listening and reading, and even writing this response took an emotional toll.

John Wade, insecure and into magic as a boy, loses his father at 14 to suicide, goes to Vietnam, comes home and marries his college sweetheart, goes into politics and almost succeeds in putting his past behind him. But it catches up in the worst way.

The threads of his life are presented as evidence during the investigation that follows his wife’s disappearance - a jumbled mixture of his childhood magic paraphernalia, testimony from his Charlie Company about a village massacre, and items involved in Wade’s breakdown from the night his wife disappeared. Also included in evidence are quotes from and about politicians and their desperate need for validation and historical figures infamous for their violent acts.

For Wade, everything is a trick - in Vietnam, the trick was to stay sane, then when he came home the trick was to keep secrets about what he’d done, and for Kathy, the trick was to make her love him and never stop. He is possessive and obsessive about her, spying on her and comparing their love to a pair of snakes eating the other’s tail until they both disappear, “One plus one equals zero.”

When the secrets come out and all hope for unconditional love and validation is gone, Wade retreats behind the mirrors in his head, his soldier persona “Sorcerer” emerges and performs the trick of his life, a vanishing act, the only way he can let her go, and the only way out for him.

Even more chilling to me was the author’s footnote: that the story and his writing is motivated by confronting the mystery and the implacable otherness of others. For all O’Brien had studied his character John Wade, “the man’s soul remains for me an absolute and impenetrable unknown, a nametag drifting willy-nilly on oceans of hapless fact. What drives me on, I realize, is a craving to force entry into another heart. Why do we care about Lizzie Borden, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Little Big Horn? Mystery! Because of all that cannot be known.”

The author ends with compassion for Wade as no different from any human: “Can we believe that he was not a monster but a man? That he was innocent of everything except his life?”And for the rest of us: “One way or another, it seems, we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history, locking up our lives and slipping day by day into the graying shadows.”

As readers, we can understand John Wade as suffering from a traumatic childhood further traumatized by the horrors of Vietnam, but can we confront the pure and absolute Mystery of otherness and our inability to know anyone? This reader experienced an overload of existential contemplation which required emergency treatment with mindless binge-watching #soulpunch

Four plus stars. Amazing. I can't possibly do this book justice. I can't even figure out how to describe it. There is so much to think about, I'm still processing. It's dark, you probably won't like the main characters much, there is a mystery, but it's also about Vietnam and PTSD and politics. The author's use of magic is inspired as is the way the story is told, which will likely drive some readers nuts, I found to be a fascinating literary device.

I've started this review three times and I'm just going to stop. I loved The Things They Carried, this isn't that but it's good.

Looks real black and white now – very clear – but back then everything came at you in bright colors. No sharp edges. Lots of glare. A nightmare like that, all you want is to forget. None of it ever seemed real in the first place.

In The Lake of the Woods holds a special place in my memory. I first read it about sixteen years ago in a stifling un-air-conditioned and over-crowded classroom, and with all my 90s angst I was prime for it to get under my skin. It was the first time that I realized there were books out there that weren’t just about what they were about. After Lake, I sought out different books and expected more of them. Looking back at my age, gender, and disposition, perhaps it should’ve been Esther Greenwood who first spoke to me - that certainly would’ve been a more comforting stereotype. As it were, for better or for worse, it was John Wade.

At the funeral he wanted to kill everybody who was crying and everybody who wasn’t. He wanted to take a hammer and crawl into the casket and kill his father for dying…..At school when the teachers told him how sorry they were that he’d lost his father, he understood that lost was just another way of saying dead. But still the idea kept turning in his mind. He’d picture his father stumbling down a dark alley, lost, not dead at all…..He'd bend down and pick up his father and put him in his pocket and be careful never to lose him again.

This imagery early in the book sprung out at me when I first read it. The class erupted into snickers, and I giggled along with them. But later, I was left with the vivid picture of an awkward, hurting boy, rustling through blades of grass and scooping up his tiny father. John Wade’s desperate seeking stopped being an amusing image and started to become sad and lonely. After that, all the books I read had to be a little sad and lonely.

What O’Brien has created with Lake is a blurry, unfocused story to mimic the blurry, unfocused nature of things – childhood, marriage, war, life. The narrative skitters around dreamily; everything is given in snippets and suggestions. Everything in John Wade’s life seems as though it’s been filtered through a funhouse mirror. Everything is a distortion. His father was an abusive alcoholic who appeared to everyone else to be a wonderful guy. His mother (like his wife Kathy later on) survives through denial and justification. John performs magic tricks throughout his childhood, controlling and performing. He goes to Vietnam where the events are covered up, half-real, and like everything else, a contorted magic trick for the viewing public. The war, like his father, like his childhood and pretty much everything, is arranged to appear to the world to be something different. After the war, John goes into politics where yet again everything is choreographed to alter reality. Everything is an illusion. Everything we think we know is really just a product of the information we’re given. From our parents, to world events, to this stranger sleeping beside us year after year. How much of what we know to be true actually is true? John Wade spends his life manipulating and covering up. Look around you - he’s not the only one.

Our own children, our fathers, our wives and husbands: Do we truly know them? How much is camouflage? How much is guessed at? How many lies get told, and when, and about what? How often do we say, or think, God, I never knew her? How often do we lie awake speculating – seeking some hidden truth? Oh, yes, it gnaws at me…

Denial is a powerful tool that can sustain people for decades. John’s denial, Kathy’s, everybody’s. We tell ourselves it will get better, just hold on, things will work out. What would our lives be like now if we had made just one different decision? How much did we really mean to that one person who will never find the courage to tell us? How much different would things be if we had just spoken up, taken a different job, moved to a different place and reinvented ourselves? If our parents were just a little less tortured, a little more stable? If some men in suits had never signed away our life and innocence?

This is not a mystery novel. We’re not supposed to figure out what happened to Kathy, if in fact anything happened to her at all. This is a book of questions, not answers. And the questions you should be asking when you’re done reading is not “did he kill her?” That’s just the magic trick. At the minimum, you should be asking why we send the mentally ill to war. Why we’re so quick to condemn what we don’t fully comprehend. How reliable are our memories. And, will we ever be free of our demons?

Mystery finally claims us.

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out...

I'm still waiting...I'm still waiting...I'm still waiting...

--Brian Eno and David Byrne


Tim O'Brien is a magician and so in a lot of ways he's like Sorcerer, John Wade from In the Lake of the Woods, but instead of smoke and mirrors O'Brien uses words to tell true stories that never happened. And we believe those stories.

Sure, all novelists tell stories that never happened, creating something out of nothing, but O'Brien does something a little more than just that, and this is why he is the best of our authors to come out of the Vietnam War and perhaps in fact the most important war writer of all time. O'Brien's take on the relationship between war and truth (often called a casualty of war) and what did or didn't happen and whether it really matters in the first place and how something can be true and never have happened at all are all particularly well suited for the mess of Vietnam and for all war stories in general.

In Going after Cacciato O'Brien writes an entire novel stretching from Vietnam to Paris and back again that never happened. When I first read Cacciato, I had a hard time coming to grips with the concept--I think I might have felt gypped, as if reading those 350 pages had been a massive waste of my time, and this probably accounts for my lower rating of the book here in GoodReads. I don't think I understood what O'Brien was doing back then and was more likely yearning for something closer to the "facts" of the Vietnam War. Near the end of Cacciato, O'Brien writes, "'Facts,' Doc Peret liked to say. 'Face facts.'" And in response, PFC Paul Berlin thinks, “The facts were not disputed. Facts did not bother him. Billy Boy had died of fright. Buff was dead. Frenchie was dead. Pederson was dead. Sydney Martin and Bernie Lynn had died in tunnels. Those were all facts, and he could face them squarely. The order of facts–which facts came first and which came last, the relations among facts–here he had trouble, but it was not the trouble of facing facts. It was the trouble of understanding them, keeping them straight." I didn't get it then but now, as I flip through Cacciato again, I see O'Brien's magic at work.

It took a while, but twenty-five years after Cacciato, I started to get it when I read The Things They Carried. In this book O'Brien begins telling a story, draws the reader in, and then pulls the figurative rug out from under his reader's feet by stopping the story and reminding him that he's reading a work of fiction, that the story he is so eagerly involved in never really happened. Then the narrator starts again, purporting to tell what did really happen, and again the man behind the curtain pops out to remind the reader that this story didn't really happen either. Here in Things, O'Brien introduces us to the idea of the "true war story" and again it's pure magic:

"You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer.
For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.

Is it true?

The answer matters.

You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen - and maybe it did, anything's possible even then you know it can't be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, 'The fuck you do that for?' and the jumper says, 'Story of my life, man,' and the other guy starts to smile but he's dead.

That's a true story that never happened."

In the Lake of the Woods is full of true stories that never happened. For me, Lake just isn't as good as The Things They Carried, but it's still a great book that continues to look at these curiosities of facts and evidence and truth, all against the backdrop of a mystery of sorts involving the missing wife of a Minnesota politician with a penchant for making things disappear. John Wade, Sorcerer back in Vietnam, had been at My Lai but after making an entire village disappear he went on to make his whole experience there disappear until someone outs him during a primary race for the Senate. In the week after losing the primary in a landslide, Wade and his wife spend a week at Lake in the Woods, where she goes missing. It's almost like O'Brien is trying to write a post-modernist thriller, a who-dunnit without a solution or maybe with three or four or five solutions and O'Brien gives you all of them. Which one really happened? My younger self would most likely have felt gypped again, but just in case such a callow reader may respond in such a way there's the intrusive narrator again, this time popping in early on page 30 in a footnote: "I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident. In any case, Kathy Wade is forever missing, and if you require solutions, you will have to look beyond these pages. Or read a different book."

So you've been warned.

Back to The Things They Carried:

"Now and then, when I tell this story [about soldier Rat Kiley torturing and killing a baby water buffalo in Vietnam], someone will come up to me afterward and say she liked it. It's always a woman. Usually it's an older woman of kindly temperament and humane politics. She'll explain that as a rule she hates war stories; she can't understand why people want to wallow in all the blood and gore. But this one she liked. The poor baby buffalo, it made her sad. Sometimes, even, there are little tears. What I should do, she'll say, is put it all behind me. Find new stories to tell.

I won't say it but I'll think it.

I'll picture Rat Kiley's face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze.

Because she wasn't listening.

It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.

But you can't say that. All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth. No Mitchell Sanders, you tell her. No Curt Lemon, no Rat Kiley. No baby buffalo. No trail junction. No baby buffalo. It's all made up. Beginning to end. Every goddamn detail - the mountains and the river and especially that poor dumb baby buffalo. None of it happened. None of it. And even if it did happen, it didn't happen in the mountains, it happened in this little village on the Batangan Peninsula, and it was raining like crazy, and one night a guy named Stink Harris woke up screaming with a leech on his tongue. You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it. And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross that river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow."

And those are exactly the three things that In the Lake of the Woods is about, love, memory and sorrow. O'Brien's war stories are always love stories. After you are given the evidence, the nature of things, and the various hypotheses, all that's left in Lake of the Woods is supposition and perhaps a happy ending, one that might remind you of Cacciato, if you substitute Verona this time for Paris. O'Brien writes, "If all is supposition, if ending is air, then why not happiness? Are we so cynical, so sophisticated as to write off even the chance of happy endings?" Maybe so, maybe happiness does "strain credibility" and the reader is more likely to lean toward the boiling, the scalded flesh and the body weighted down in the lake than to accept a disappearing act that ends happily ever after, but O'Brien isn't giving any answers here. In his final footnote, the man behind the curtain says, "One way or another, it seems, we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history, locking up our lives and slipping day by day into the graying shadows. Our whereabouts are uncertain. All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond the dark there is only maybe." That "maybe" takes us back to the final sentence of Cacciato, and again leaves us still waiting.

When I was a kid the awful images of that ditch filled with bodies in My Lai were everywhere. I still can see those pictures in my mind, but today you probably couldn't get a classroom of AP U.S. History students to tell you what My Lai was. That's a disappearing act as well, one that rivals anything Sorcerer could do; it's the "effacing history" that O'Brien mentions at the end of Lake, some of it intentional and some of it merely the result of the passing of time. But we live in a post-Vietnam society where the president can create a fictitious war out of nothing, one that killed thousands of U.S. troops and tens of thousands of noncombatants, one where journalists are embedded into the invading forces and yet no images of the carnage were ever shared with the U.S. public. We live in a time when even the images of flag-draped coffins of our returning dead were disappeared by powerful magicians and now that this war is over (long after it was declared mission accomplished by the magician-in-chief) it's almost as though it never even happened. "Could the truth be so simple?" O'Brien asks in his final sentence, "So terrible?"

A depressing book about two unhappy people whose marriage has been disintegrating daily due to the psychological problems of both. PTSD over the Vietnam war's My Lai massacre is seemingly to blame for the downward spiral of the lives of the couple, but this is obviously not the entire cause, as both participants have other psychological problems. The way the book is written, with chapters of vignettes and quotations from acquaintances and family members interspersed with narration in third person subjective, was very slow and rather boring to read. The writing is more literary than anything else -- certainly not a thriller -- and the reader is left with no closure at the end. This is a book I would not have read unless it had been chosen as the BOTM for October in the Goodreads Psychological Thrillers Group. It is psychological, all right, but NO THRILLER! I would not recommend reading it unless you have nothing better to read, or unless you want to feel better about the normal life you are fortunate enough to lead.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. I kept thinking while reading it that I should be enjoying it more. But I just didn't.

This was essentially a character study of the main character after the fact. It's written as though compiled from notes by an investigator. Although it mostly reads like a typical narrative, there are some chapters that are labeled "evidence" and full of quotes from various sources (some real and some fictional) that relate to the story in some way. There are also "hypothesis" chapters where he is guessing what happened to the main character's wife who just disappeared.

It's told nonlinearly, mixing the past, present, and future together, but it honestly worked better for me than most nonlinear stories do. I still did miss the single narrative, I think. And there were points in this story where he would reference things from the future, like saying "John would wonder about this moment in two days after his wife vanished" that didn't work for me. I often feel that writing like that creates distance between me and the story. I can't get as connected with that kind of style.

It was also a little too convoluted for me. I like to be able to keep track of every single thing that's happening, and this is one of those stories where you can't and don't even need to. Each quote is referenced to a source, some with the date of the interview, and I tried so hard to keep all of that in order in my head, but it was just too much. It's one of those things that wasn't really necessary, but it definitely bothered me to not be able to.

I didn't find the main character as interesting as I should have. Like I said above, this book is essentially a character study of this man and his entire life. I love character study books, but I just wasn't that interested by John Wade. He was an intentionally unlikable character who stalked his wife and talked frequently of loving to manipulate people. But it didn't feel especially interesting. I can't exactly put my finger on why, but I wasn't as invested in him as I should have been. Still enough to get through this whole book in a day, though.

Finally, there was one thing that actually really bothered me about this book. The person who is compiling the book, who's not actually a character in the story and mostly removes himself from the narration, says that he doesn't think the main character killed his wife because he was crazy about her. Like this man who literally stalked his wife, who said he needed her, who got incredibly jealous and caught her cheating on him, wouldn't have killed her because he was crazy about her? He seems like a prime candidate for murdering her. Which is not to say I think he did, but that one line really bothered me. Men who kill their wives often exhibit those behaviors, and I didn't like the implication that the reason he wouldn't was because he was crazy about her. But that was just one line so it didn't ruin the book or anything. Just made me very uncomfortable at the moment he said it.

Overall, I thought this book was pretty decent. It held my attention and I got through it quickly because I enjoyed reading it. There was always just something that kept me from entirely enjoying it, and I can't quite figure out what. Probably just a combination of all my issues but nothing singularly bad. It's definitely one I'd recommend if it sounds interesting to you. I thought the style was really unique and well done, just maybe not for me overall.

Additional warning, this is not a book where you're going to get closure or figure out for a fact what happened. That's not spoiler, it's stated pretty early on. So if you're someone who needs to find out what happened, this probably isn't for you.