This book has made me shudder at least six times. Astoundingly good. Tim O'Brien has such a subtle mastery, it's almost frightening to read his work. He introduces a seemingly innocuous line on page 10 that sticks out just enough to make you wonder what it's true relevance is, then when he finally reveals it, a hundred pages later, it's devastating. As in The Things They Carried, O'Brien tells a riveting story that reverses back on itself multiple times, and also directly addresses the dilemma of storytelling, and the blurred lines between fiction, non-fiction, and truth. How do you tell a true story? How do you know what's true? Why do we need to uncover secrets we can never truly know?
The story itself is not overly complicated: a promising young politician named John Wade suffers a crushing defeat after a dark secret from his past in Vietnam is revealed. Shortly afterwards, his wife disappears and Wade becomes a suspect. We see the story in the present, curl back to see Wade's experiences in the war, which are as chilling as any I've ever read, his relationship with his wife when it at first seemed to be innocent and loving, and see Wade's painful childhood where he first began to keep secrets from his loved ones and himself. Alternating chapters also hypothesize how events may have played out, while others present pieces of evidence as decontextualized quotes, both from characters testifying about the events in the story, and passages from real world biographies of major political figures and other works on relevant non-fiction. In footnotes that appear mostly in Evidence chapters, the narrator becomes a character, trying as desperately as the reader to tease a thread of meaning and truth from the dark. The narrator's identity remains as ambiguous as what really happened to the wife. This further problematizes the fiction/non-fiction line, as the narrator seems to have much in common with the author, but the other characters are supposedly creations of his imagination. This asks the question, how different is fiction from non-fiction? In both, the author and the reader struggle to find something true, something that is unknowable and unreachable.
The latter half treads water for a time and over-explains ideas that are already clear, but the ending pulls every idea together beautifully.

In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien is a book of historical fiction. It accurately portrays the slaughter of Vietnamese villagers by American soldiers on March 16, 1968 in Thuan Yen, South Vietnam. Reading of the events is grisly. Those who lived through that day and survived would be forever traumatized.

The central protagonist of the fictional story was there that day. His name is John Ward. The story is about him and his wife Kathy. John goes into politics in an effort to wipe clean that which stains his past. When he runs for the U.S. senate, his past is revealed. Some accuse him of atrocities committed in Vietnam. After losing his bid for senator, he and his wife retreat to the woods of northern Minnesota. Then his wife disappears. This is the fictional part of the story, but that which it says about living after having survived that day in March is by no means fiction.

We are given a mystery that is to be solved. What has happened to Kathy? Murder? If murder, then by whom and how? Suicide? Does this make sense? Do the known facts corroborate this?

The book presents facts in a manner that keeps the reader guessing. This frustrated me. The story flips back and forth not only in time but also between chapters of different content, purpose and type. This is terribly confusing at the start. There are chapters entitled “hypothesis”. Others entitled “evidence”. These chapters relate to a crime having been committed, but in fact we still do not know if a crime does lie at the bottom pf Kathy’s disappearance! The “hypothesis” and “evidence” chapters are intermixed with chapters about events in John’s and Kathy’s lives. The chapters about their lives are not presented in chronological order. In the initial “evidence chapters”, we are given quotes stating what characters say, but we do not yet know who these characters are or what has happened! Quotes from books and well known people are thrown in too. Information is not presented clearly. Information of value is difficult to appreciate because of the lack of context. Other information is withheld from the reader to enhance suspense. I do not like being toyed with in this fashion. How the story is put together is not to my liking.

Information is repeated. Also, that which is most often repeated are those elements of the story which are the most grisly and disturbing! We are meant to be upset, shocked and repulsed. We are, and in spades!

Kathy is a woman I could not relate to at all. I thought I understood her at the tart, but my first impression fizzled. The more I was told about her, the less I understood her.

I have given the book two stars rather than one because I do appreciate what the author is saying about the Vietnam War and those who fought in the war, about what is says about politicians and the destructive repercussions of keeping secrets in a relationship. I have nothing against the messages conveyed by the novel, but I do not like how the author chose to convey these messages. I have nothing against the story’s open-ended conclusion. We are in fact forewarned that the conclusion will be open-ended.

The audiobook is narrated by L. J. Ganser. I have no complaints whatsoever with his performance. The performance is very good, so I have given it four stars. It is clear and easy to follow.

I do not like how this story is told. That the events of March 16, 1968 in Thuan Yen, South Vietnam, are brought to the fore is good.


*******************

*The Things They Carried 3 stars
*In the Lake of the Woods 2 stars
*Going After Cacciato TBR

I preface this review by acknowledging that this star rating is probably unfair- based on my lack of homework pre-read. I read this solely based on another author recommend and the fact that Tim O'Brien was well-esteemed. I read two blurbs on the back, knew it was a mystery of sorts, and off I went.

The writing was good and the story did not feel dated for being published in 1994. There are no cell phones and there is mention of a landline, but that is obviously par for the course. John Wade has fallen from grace, losing a US Senate election by a 3:1 landslide. He and his wife take a breather for a few weeks in a little cabin...you guessed it-In the Lake of the Woods. They are secluded in Minnesota and unwinding/taking stock of their lives and what the future will hold. A few days into this depressing trip, Kathy disappears...along with a rowboat in the shed.

The novel then unfolds as a series of evidence snippets, John's remembrances of the events leading up to her disappearance, chapters hypothesizing how it could have happened,and investigative reports. Things are vague throughout, including the sections highlighting John's sketchy behaviors.

John has struggled with finding love and attention throughout his life. He had a troubled relationship with his father (who teased him for his weight), took to magic for attention as a child, seemed to be crying out for recognition as he joined the Vietnam war efforts, and sought the ultimate affirmation in his run for political elections.

MAJOR DISLIKE: The long and profoundly disturbing sections detailing war atrocities, specifically mutilation of women and children. I knew he was struggling with PTSD and I'm not trying to downplay that, I appreciate that O'Brien showed the way soldiers (especially in this case) have to assimilate back into civilian life. The issue is the placement in the book and how long and detailed it was....if I wanted to read about the Vietnam War (and I think a reader should be prepared for that type of thing) I would just read The Things They Carried (I've heard Brian Cranston narrates this exceptionally on audiobook FYI:-).

It truly felt like a really exploitative way to add to the mystery of this lady and I really had a problem with it. Also, these highly graphic details are placed in the middle, so you are already invested in the story and do want to see where it pans out. Basically, it felt like the wrong medium to place such extreme content.

I realize this opinion may be controversial, but the mystery was diluted in quite a disturbing way. Just not for me.

This literary thriller skews more literary than thriller, but I guarantee you'll still be thinking about it for a good long while after finishing it. In short summary, a failed candidate for the US Senate retreats to a lake-side cabin with his wife to hide from the scandal, details of atrocities committed while in Vietnam, that doomed his campaign and to figure out next steps. The book follows multiple timelines as the reader is given insight into what happened during the war, his relationship with his wife from meeting to present, his political aspirations, and a few days into this retreat when his wife disappears along with the boat. I like my mysteries/thrillers with more conclusive endings, usually, but I can't get over the writing along with how the story is presented. It is beautifully crafted.

***Spoilers***
I was intrigued with the mystery in the first third of the book. When the narrator tells the reader that we will never know what happened, I became impatient & apathetic about the plot. I didn’t care for any of the characters except maybe Claude & Ruth. I kept reading because Sue thought highly of the book. The last third of the novel, really redeemed any misgivings I had. O’Brien takes on so much historic scope & psychology with this novel. It is not just about Vietnam, it is about any war. It is not just about Wade running for office, but what it means to be a politician with all eyes on you. The magician theme that runs through the novel is very effective, but O’Brien keeps the magician’s secret & doesn’t give us a true ending, a true resolution... A few years ago, this would have driven me crazy, but now I respect the literary devise that he uses in not giving us a tidy ending, because it goes along with his theme of not ever knowing people, history or secrets in the human heart. (To interject a little pop culture here, it is not unlike what David Chase did with the ending of the tv show The Sopranos.) The reader needs to pick the best hypothesis. The other characters in the book also have their own theories of what happened. Ruth wants the couple to have run off together & get a fresh new start & live happily like her & Claude do. I guess that is why I like their characters so much. They are happy with each other & still have faith in others. However, I don’t think that is the hypothesis I will sign up for. I think Wade would be capable of harming Kathy. I think he would be capable of anything, like Vinny Pearson did, but I’m going to hold out a little more hope for humanity than that. Wade is mentally ill. He was before he went to Vietnam. He is not innocent of what happened there. I am not without sympathy about what happened to the soldiers in the village of Thuan Yen (absolutely no excuse for their behavior, but O’Brien does a good job of pointing out that they are not the first, nor, unfortunately the last men to violently kill civilians in a war), but once he decided to remain silent AND alter his records, in my mind, he went from “bystander” of the massacre to “manipulator”. He was creepy. Kathleen, though, was stupidly impotent. I there is one criticism of the novel is that I don’t think O’Brien really gave me a good enough picture of why she would stay with him. I can’t buy the lost in love angle. And that is why I don’t really care for her character... This of course means that I don’t think she left him that day on the lake. I don’t think she had it in her. I think she got lost, and Wade either committed suicide or went away to relive his nightmares by himself somewhere in Canada. I think Wade lied so much that he doesn’t even know what happened. He knows he was capable of harming her, and because he has become so good at forgetting trauma, he knows he could’ve made her murder “disappear” in his memory also. But I don’t think he did hurt her. Sue is right about O’Brien’s use of time & narrative devises, fresh & effective. The structure works very well to tell this story. I am glad I didn’t stop reading the book, because this is one book I will be pondering for a long time.

"The secrets would remain secret - the things he'd seen, the things he'd done. He would repair what he could, he would endure, he would go from year to year without letting on that there were tricks." - Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.” - Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

In the Lake of the Woods is a mystery without a resolution. That's not a spoiler: O'Brien makes this aspect of the book clear from the beginning. There are the references to magic tricks, to things no one knows. Kathy Wade vanished, and it's up to the audience to figure out the trick.

That sounds frustratingly post-modern, but it isn't. In the Lake of the Woods is a tightly constructed thriller. It's deeply disturbing, but also strangely satisfying. It feels as if there's a climax, a denouement, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you what they were. Instead, I'll try to figure out how O'Brien pulled these sleight of hand tricks over on a scrupulous reader such as myself. The magician, of course, never tells.

“can we believe that he was not a monster but a man? that he was innocent of everything except his life?”

tim. you’re a genuis, im pretty sure.

i have never in my whole life been disappointed by a tim o’brien book & this was no exception.

incredible & brilliant from start to finish. the way he’s able to weave a narrative so rich with depictions of setting & motive of character is unlike anyone else.

i loved the way the entire book was set up: an expression of facts, evidence, & hypotheses but ultimately inconclusive & soley left up to the reader to make their own conclusions (rip hemingway, your iceberg theory lives on).

god, idk what even else to say. i loved this book so much. i’ll be thinking about it for a long time. genuis.

always used to say tim was the modern hemingway, but i’m beginning to think he’s better…

my favorite tim o’brien book. & that’s saying a lot considering all his books are masterpieces.

Very poignant and haunting, I really appreciated this book. I'm always very affected by books where a horrible truth is slowly revealed. It was also cool that it takes place in Minnesota, and to read about these landmarks I know (University Ave...).

The book touches on a lot of different topics. The Vietnam war and the effect it has on one's psyche, abuse, magic, love, politics... I was initially thinking that it might be just too many ideas for one book to explore, but I think they are all thematically related. It does a good job of really going deep into the mind of this just broken man. How do we create illusions for others, for ourselves, in order to cope with our life experiences?

The structure of the book is also pretty interesting, a little experimental. It is very nonlinear, flashing between the past and present, revealing a little more each time. But it's also interesting how O'Brien writes these sections where he has both fictional and real interviews / quotations from people. And every so often there would be a footnote that isn't just a citation but instead is the author musing about some topic related to the quotations, it's kind of hidden and jumps out at you when you first notice it.

This is the second book from Tim O'Brien I've read; I read The Things They Carried in high school. I'll have to check out other books he has written in the future.

Phenomenal. It's a novel about love, evil, obsession, memory, guilt, complicity, and the improbability of ever really knowing someone who doesn't want to be known, but above all it's O'Brien's attempt to come to grips with the My Lai Massacre. He creates an obsessed narrator who can't let go of the mysterious disappearance of Kathleen Wade, whose husband John was humiliated in a Senatorial campaign after his careful attempts to cover up his role in the slaughter of a village of Vietnamese civilians prove ineffective. The narrator tells the Wades' tale in three ways: 1) through "reliable" accounts of their life together based on research 2) through hypothetical projections of what might have happened to Kathleen and 3) through transcriptions of what amounts to a research notebook (quotes from interviews, real life excerpts from the testimony of the soldiers of Charlie Company, quotes from literature, lines from biographies of Nixon and Woodrow Wilson, a few lines from the last letter from Ambrose Bierce, etc.) None of the approaches work, so the narrator resorts to personal footnotes that clarify his struggle while muddling his attempts even further.

Wade was a magician, and while he was unable to vanish the My Lai Massacre he may well have vanished his wife. Or maybe not. His own memory is so unreliable that even he does not know. Our narrator then, has an impossible task--to write with authority about an unsolvable mystery. Of course, that's what O'Brien's up to as well as he tries to make sense of senseless violence and evil. It's all expertly managed, and it's doing exactly what O'Brien wants it to do--sitting in my stomach like a stone. It's been a while since I was this impressed by a book.

“The human desire for certainty collides with our love of enigma…Would it help…to issue a reminder that death itself resolves into uncertainty, and that out of such uncertainty arise great temples of tales of salvation?” – Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

As this book opens in 1986, John Wade, a politician, has suffered a landslide defeat in his bid for the US Senate. He had previously led in the polls, but recent adverse publicity led to his defeat. He has retreated with his wife, Kathy, to a cabin at the Lake of the Woods in Minnesota near the border of Canada. Within 36 hours of arriving at the cabin, Kathy disappears.

The narrative offers different hypotheses of what may have happened to Kathy. It also flashes back to John’s childhood, relationship history, hobbies, Vietnam service, and career in politics. Chapters consisting of evidence are sporadically inserted. Ironically, the evidence chapters do not always lend clarity – they just create more questions. This story is complex and layered. It appears the author is involved, years later, in trying to piece together what happened. Themes include relationships, suppression of horrible memories, appearances versus reality, and the psychological scars of war.

The tone of uncertainty is maintained to a degree I would not have imagined possible. Throughout the story, the reader will question whether or not John was involved in his wife’s disappearance. As a warning, it includes detailed gory descriptions of the war-related carnage against civilians, which is part of John Wade’s past and is integral to the plot. I put aside everything else I was reading to finish this book. I found it fascinating.

When a student I am tutoring described this book to me (as a result of my asking about an assignment concerning it), I wasn't at all interested. However, I make it a habit to read the works my students are reading so I am able to help them better.

I was thrilled by it. I had only read The Things They Carried before this, but I'd rate this one right up there with it.

John Wade has issues. His father committed suicide when John was young, but the two had never been close. He never received a compliment from his father, or anything else besides mockery.

John became a magician and a good one. His father, of course, never understood why. But John felt powerful and in control when he was doing tricks. This became his goal for the rest of his life: control.

He also set up what he called "mirrors" in his head to allow him to see happenings differently than they happened and to help him forget what he wanted to.

These mirrors came in handy after John, a soldier in the Vietnam War, participated in the massacre at My Lai. However, he didn't forget completely. When he was assigned a desk job at the end of his second tour, he went about changing his company assignment to A Company instead of the notorious Charlie Company.

In the meantime, John had met a woman in college with whom he fell in love and wanted to possess. Yes, you heard it right. Here comes the stalker part. John spied on her to make sure she wasn't cheating on him. Amazingly, she actually married him when he came back from Nam.

From then on, John's life is devoted to politics. He rises to the position of Lieutenant Governor in Minnesota and decides to try for US Senate. Then the world crashes. His past at My Lai is exposed. His wife Kathy is stunned but never says anything. However, she is ecstatic that the political life (which she never liked) has ended.

The couple decide to go to the Lake of the Woods to recover and decide the new direction of their lives. They are broke, with no direction, and no clear future.

Then Kathy disappears.

At first, everyone assumes that she went out for a walk and got lost in the woods. Then, after they notice that the boat and outboard motor are gone, they decide she must have taken it out and gotten lost. Weeks go by as the search continues.

The neighbor whom John first told of Kathy's disappearance (nearly 15 hours after he claims to have seen her last) finds a strange thing in the house: all the house plants have been scalded with hot water and are now rotting.

The book actually revolves around the suspicion that John has done away with his wife. Several chapters are entitled Hypothesis and Evidence, each of which offers a differing story of what could have happened to cause the disappearance and statements from locals, Kathy's mother and sister, and literary or expert selections concerning control, returning vets, and other relevant topics.

I won't spoil the ending, but if you like complicated plots that don't veer off in the usual directions, you must read this book. And other books by Tim O'Brien.

This book, critically acclaimed from a much-praised author, didn't work for me. First, because the publisher lied to me in the promotion (as publishers often do), quoting critics--a memorable mystery, ...a mystery that the Agatha Christies of this earth never glimpse.
But with careful reading between the lines, however, some critical praise is informative: 'O'Brien knows there's no mystery as good as an unresolved one .. .' and 'O'Brien turns the thriller from inside out, replacing answers with plausible hypotheses . . .'
For me, there's no greater failure for a mystery than to end without resolution. And this one does it to the max: the wife has disappeared in lake country, and by the end of the book we know she's still missing. Murder? Accident? Suicide? No idea. In fact, O'Brien cleverly, or bizarrely, avoids committing to any story. The book has numerous chapters titled 'Hypothesis'. The text suggests, what if she took the boat for a ride, maybe stopped at a island, maybe built a small fire? No, the author isn't saying that happened, only that it could have happened.
The only engaging part of the book, for me, were horrific scenes of war atrocities in which the protagonist was a participant. No, what-if-somebody-was-shot hypothesis here. The overall point being that the protagonist has PTSD from the horrors of war, and thus maybe, possibly, could do something untoward. Not saying.
It occurs to me this book is absolutely safe from plot spoilers, as the suspense of not knowing what happened as you begin is exactly the same as not knowing at the end.