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In the Lake of the Woods
This riveting novel of love and mystery from the author of The Things They Carried examines the lasting impact of the twentieth century’s legacy of violence and warfare, both at home and abroad. When long-hidden secrets about the atrocities he committed in Vietnam come to light, a candidate for the U.S. Senate retreats with his wife to a lakeside cabin in northern Minnesota. Within days of their arrival, his wife mysteriously vanishes into the watery wilderness.
303 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
About the author
Tim O'Brien
118 books2,886 followersTim O’Brien matriculated at Macalester College. Graduation in 1968 found him with a BA in political science and a draft notice.
O’Brien was against the war but reported for service and was sent to Vietnam with what has been called the “unlucky” Americal division due to its involvement in the My Lai massacre in 1968, an event which figures prominently in In the Lake of the Woods. He was assigned to 3rd Platoon, A Company, 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry, as an infantry foot soldier. O’Brien’s tour of duty was 1969-70.
After Vietnam he became a graduate student at Harvard. No doubt he was one of very few Vietnam veterans there at that time, much less Combat Infantry Badge (CIB) holders. Having the opportunity to do an internship at the Washington Post, he eventually left Harvard to become a newspaper reporter. O'Brien's career as a reporter gave way to his fiction writing after publication of his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Send Me Home.
Tim O'Brien is now a visiting professor and endowed chair at Texas State University - San Marcos (formerly Southwest Texas State University) where he teaches in the Creative Writing Program.
O’Brien was against the war but reported for service and was sent to Vietnam with what has been called the “unlucky” Americal division due to its involvement in the My Lai massacre in 1968, an event which figures prominently in In the Lake of the Woods. He was assigned to 3rd Platoon, A Company, 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry, as an infantry foot soldier. O’Brien’s tour of duty was 1969-70.
After Vietnam he became a graduate student at Harvard. No doubt he was one of very few Vietnam veterans there at that time, much less Combat Infantry Badge (CIB) holders. Having the opportunity to do an internship at the Washington Post, he eventually left Harvard to become a newspaper reporter. O'Brien's career as a reporter gave way to his fiction writing after publication of his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Send Me Home.
Tim O'Brien is now a visiting professor and endowed chair at Texas State University - San Marcos (formerly Southwest Texas State University) where he teaches in the Creative Writing Program.
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June 4, 2015
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.
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.
December 28, 2017
I loved this book the first time I read it, and I loved it having just finished it for the second time. I could easily go back to the beginning and read it for a third time right now. This book is not for the faint at heart, nor is it for people who have to have things tied up in bows. It's a book that demonstrates the shattering of a psyche that was fragile to begin with. It's a book about a man who doesn't know himself and thus seeks a definition of self through others and their reactions to him. The vehicle that Tim O'Brien uses is the Vietnam War, which he knows well from first hand experience. Within that vehicle lies the horror of the My Lai massacre If the reader is a "my country right or wrong" sort of person, then this book is going to shatter a lot of illusions about war and country. If the reader is someone who likes the exploration of relationships, psyches, souls and the forces that damage those areas of life, then this is the book. I'd give it six stars if I could. I love it that much.
.
.
June 16, 2016
"John Wade, you've just lost a big election and have been publicly shamed. What are you going to do next?"
"I'm going toDisney World a remote cabin by a lake where I can ruminate, lick my wounds, and possibly murder my wife!"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yep, when a lady vanishes, who's the number one suspect? In this case, it just might be the husband. Through flashbacks, we learn all about John, and the more we know, the less we like him.
In early November he began spying on her. He felt some guilt at first, which bothered him, but he also found satisfaction in it.
Then, there's this . . .
He moved with determination across the surface of his life, attending to a marriage and a career. He performed the necessary tricks, dreamed the necessary dreams. On occasion though, he'd yell in his sleep --- loud, desperate, obscene things --- and Kathy would reach out and ask what was wrong. Her eyes would betray visible fear. "It wasn't even your voice," she'd say. "It wasn't even you."
O'Brien manages to work yet another very compelling Vietnam story into this one, but that plot line sadly takes a backseat to the main story. I found it interesting that, though this book predates Gone Girl by almost two decades, there's that similar unsettling vibe of an unlikable man who has trouble working up a public display of grief over his missing wife.
" . . . it might help to start acting like a husband. Some normal concern, it'll look real sweet to people."
Gillian, did you read this book before writing your mega-seller?
Anyway, I found this to be quite a page-turner, but was ultimately left unsatisfied.
Then there was the problem of timing.
A really creepy guy who loses an election, and may or may not have murdered his pretty blond wife?
Dun-dun-duhn!
Better run, Heidi!
"I'm going to
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yep, when a lady vanishes, who's the number one suspect? In this case, it just might be the husband. Through flashbacks, we learn all about John, and the more we know, the less we like him.
In early November he began spying on her. He felt some guilt at first, which bothered him, but he also found satisfaction in it.
Then, there's this . . .
He moved with determination across the surface of his life, attending to a marriage and a career. He performed the necessary tricks, dreamed the necessary dreams. On occasion though, he'd yell in his sleep --- loud, desperate, obscene things --- and Kathy would reach out and ask what was wrong. Her eyes would betray visible fear. "It wasn't even your voice," she'd say. "It wasn't even you."
O'Brien manages to work yet another very compelling Vietnam story into this one, but that plot line sadly takes a backseat to the main story. I found it interesting that, though this book predates Gone Girl by almost two decades, there's that similar unsettling vibe of an unlikable man who has trouble working up a public display of grief over his missing wife.
" . . . it might help to start acting like a husband. Some normal concern, it'll look real sweet to people."
Gillian, did you read this book before writing your mega-seller?
Anyway, I found this to be quite a page-turner, but was ultimately left unsatisfied.
Then there was the problem of timing.
A really creepy guy who loses an election, and may or may not have murdered his pretty blond wife?
Dun-dun-duhn!
Better run, Heidi!
January 31, 2023
This is a deceptively angry book. It may look normal and unassuming on the outside, even boring, but on the inside, it's a slow-building, roiling, burning rage, the kind that sucks you in and makes you burn along with it. And I could not stop reading or even look away. Finished it in 36 hours. All I did this weekend was read this book and let it burn.
Beautifully written, bitterly frustrating, angry and wholly unexpected.
[...]
[...]
[...]
The theme "you can't ever go home again" prevails infuriatingly throughout the writing, cementing the fact that, here in this story, you really can't go home again.
Normally I hate fiction that leaves the reader without closure or an ending. Why read books that imitate real life when there's already too much real life in your own life? That has always been my reason for staying away from contemporary fiction. But it's different with this book and its open ending and lack of closure and lack of subtlety, all because it's Tim O'Brien (better known for his memoir of his experience in the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried). There's a sharpness to his writing that has always spoken to me. It's almost as though I get him and what he's saying. No one writes about memory and pain like Tim O'Brien, and no one writes about being lost in the wilderness of post-traumatic stress quite like he does.
This book found me at the right time and in the right state of mind to appreciate its infuriating complexity. In a different mood, at a different time, and I would have no doubt stopped reading somewhere around page 20. But there was something about this past weekend that made this book call out to me. Every word, every line, made sense in a way that contemporary fiction rarely does for me. Maybe it's Tim O'Brien. Or maybe it's simpler than that, maybe I just wanted to get lost in a lake in the woods (preferably one that's accessible only by helicopter).
Cross-posted at https://covers2covers.wordpress.com/2...
Beautifully written, bitterly frustrating, angry and wholly unexpected.
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.
[...]
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 have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.
[...]
The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she’d lived a life almost entirely indoors. Her memories were indoor memories, fixed by ceilings and plastered white walls. Her whole life had been locked to geometries: suburban rectangles, city squares. First the house she’d grown up in, then dorms and apartments. The open air had been nothing but a medium of transit, a place for rooms to exist.
The theme "you can't ever go home again" prevails infuriatingly throughout the writing, cementing the fact that, here in this story, you really can't go home again.
Normally I hate fiction that leaves the reader without closure or an ending. Why read books that imitate real life when there's already too much real life in your own life? That has always been my reason for staying away from contemporary fiction. But it's different with this book and its open ending and lack of closure and lack of subtlety, all because it's Tim O'Brien (better known for his memoir of his experience in the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried). There's a sharpness to his writing that has always spoken to me. It's almost as though I get him and what he's saying. No one writes about memory and pain like Tim O'Brien, and no one writes about being lost in the wilderness of post-traumatic stress quite like he does.
My heart tells me to stop right here, to offer quiet benediction and call it the end. But the truth won't allow it. Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. Nothing is fixed, nothing solved. The facts, such as they are, finally spin off into the void of things missing, the inconclusiveness of us. Who are we? Where do we go? The ambiguity may be dissatisfying, even irritating, but this is a love story. There is no tidiness. Blame it on the human heart. 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.
This book found me at the right time and in the right state of mind to appreciate its infuriating complexity. In a different mood, at a different time, and I would have no doubt stopped reading somewhere around page 20. But there was something about this past weekend that made this book call out to me. Every word, every line, made sense in a way that contemporary fiction rarely does for me. Maybe it's Tim O'Brien. Or maybe it's simpler than that, maybe I just wanted to get lost in a lake in the woods (preferably one that's accessible only by helicopter).
Cross-posted at https://covers2covers.wordpress.com/2...
December 6, 2011
First of all, this book made me realize how much I generally like most books that I read. Because this was a screaming exception.
This is the basic summary of the story: In the Lake of the Woods is O'Brien's portrayal of a historian or biographer's attempt at piecing together the mystery of the disappearance of Kathy Wade. Kathy's husband, John, recently lost a primary election to become Minnesota's Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate after his involvement in the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam was revealed to the public.
I hated the structure of the book. It was divided into the story, pages of weird evidence (quotes from other trials, from literature, from interviews of the missing woman's case), and hypothetical imaginings of where the woman was. I didn't care if they found her. I didn't care what happened to John, either.
I hated John (the main character). I didn't care for his wife Kathy (the missing woman). I hated the story itself, I didn't care about anything that was happening to them. I just felt revulsion in how they portrayed John's obsession with his wife throughout college--he totally grossed me out. HATE.
People on Amazon's reviews mostly loved it. But I really appreciated this particular negative review, because it totally got how I felt about it: "This novel does not have enough thematic substance or emotional resonance to carry our interest. The symbolism is heavy handed and the protagonist lacks sympathy. His parents are caricatures, as are the other supporting characters. Kathy, the missing wife, is not developed as a character enough nor is their marriage compelling enough to induce our interest in their fate as a couple or as individuals. "
So glad it's OVER. Never have to read that one again.
This is the basic summary of the story: In the Lake of the Woods is O'Brien's portrayal of a historian or biographer's attempt at piecing together the mystery of the disappearance of Kathy Wade. Kathy's husband, John, recently lost a primary election to become Minnesota's Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate after his involvement in the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam was revealed to the public.
I hated the structure of the book. It was divided into the story, pages of weird evidence (quotes from other trials, from literature, from interviews of the missing woman's case), and hypothetical imaginings of where the woman was. I didn't care if they found her. I didn't care what happened to John, either.
I hated John (the main character). I didn't care for his wife Kathy (the missing woman). I hated the story itself, I didn't care about anything that was happening to them. I just felt revulsion in how they portrayed John's obsession with his wife throughout college--he totally grossed me out. HATE.
People on Amazon's reviews mostly loved it. But I really appreciated this particular negative review, because it totally got how I felt about it: "This novel does not have enough thematic substance or emotional resonance to carry our interest. The symbolism is heavy handed and the protagonist lacks sympathy. His parents are caricatures, as are the other supporting characters. Kathy, the missing wife, is not developed as a character enough nor is their marriage compelling enough to induce our interest in their fate as a couple or as individuals. "
So glad it's OVER. Never have to read that one again.
June 3, 2012
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.
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.
August 19, 2018
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?"
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?"
September 21, 2020
“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.
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.
January 15, 2021
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.
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.
September 19, 2018
Whoever undertakes to write a biography binds himself to lying, to concealment, to flummery ... Truth is not accessible.
Sigmund Freud, as cited by Alfred Kazin, "The Self as History: Reflections on Autobiography".
5 stars for sure. Gripping, amazing read. Not a fun read though. Parts are too intense to be fun.
O'Brien the consummate unreliable (third person) narrator here. And he's at his most unreliable when it looks like he's being most reliable. Footnotes here, there, everywhere. Many of the footnotes reference books which are most certainly real. Many references to books about atrocities, one atrocity in particular: The Court Martial of William Calley for example. Four Hours in My Lai for example. Report of the Department of the Army, Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident for example. Many also reference personal interviews which the narrator conducted. Really?
Writing of My Lai …
Some of the notes are extended first-person ruminations, almost confessional in nature, about the author's experiences in Vietnam, his memories many years later, of those experiences, his fading memories, things he thinks he remembers, but isn't sure that he does.
The protagonists? Well, the novel is a romance, a love story. As near as the narrator can figure out. John and Kathy Wade. Madly in love, but somehow acting a little bit funny, are they really in love? The narrator speculates, delves into their thoughts, their own memories. Here he is, paradoxically, perhaps being the most reliable? Remember this author's insistence in The Things They Carried that the most true war stories are ones which never happened? Kind of the same thing here. Did the things remembered, or maybe remembered, happen? Does is matter? What are we being told about the human psyche, human memory, human love, human emotion, human fright, the attempt to forget, to hide from oneself things which may have been done, which seem to be remembered but which maybe never happened, at least in the way remembered.
One very reliable topic narrated here, as it winds its way increasingly into the story, is that of the Lake of the Woods.
Max. length 68 mi (109 km)
Max. width 59 mi (95 km)
Surface area 1,679 sq mi (4,348.6 km2)
Max. depth 210 ft (64 m)
Shore length excluding islands: 25,000 mi (40,000 km)
including islands: 65,000 mi (105,000 km)
number of islands: >14,500
Lying in the north country of Minnesota, and partially in two Canadian provinces, the Lake of the Woods is described in O'Brien's inimitable prose, as here: someone is steering a boat through this wilderness, beginning to realize that they have missed a known channel and are now somewhere in the lake that they have never been – and the wilderness, the trees, the dense forests on the islands, the water, the sun, the clouds – nothing shows any sign of being different, any likelihood of being a landmark, there are no signs, no cabins, no other boats, nothing …
Not an easy read. Yet couldn't put it down. Burned my fingers I think.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Previous review: Varieties of Disturbance Lydia Davis
Next review: The Open Boat and Other Stories Stephan Crane
More recent/Older review: ___
Previous library review: The Things They Carried
Next library review: A Firing Offense G Pelecanos
Sigmund Freud, as cited by Alfred Kazin, "The Self as History: Reflections on Autobiography".
5 stars for sure. Gripping, amazing read. Not a fun read though. Parts are too intense to be fun.
O'Brien the consummate unreliable (third person) narrator here. And he's at his most unreliable when it looks like he's being most reliable. Footnotes here, there, everywhere. Many of the footnotes reference books which are most certainly real. Many references to books about atrocities, one atrocity in particular: The Court Martial of William Calley for example. Four Hours in My Lai for example. Report of the Department of the Army, Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident for example. Many also reference personal interviews which the narrator conducted. Really?
Writing of My Lai …
Sorcerer uttered meaningless sounds – "No", he said, then after a second he said, "Please!" – and then the sunlight sucked him down a trail toward the center of the village, where he found burning hootches and brightly mobile figures engaged in murder. Simpson was killing children. PFC Weatherby was killing whatever he could kill. A row of corpses lay in the pink-to-purple sunshine along the trail – teenagers and old women and two babies and a young boy. Most were dead, some where almost dead. The dead lay very still. The almost-dead did twitching things until PFC Weatherby had occasion to reload and make them fully dead. The noise was fierce. No one was dying quietly. There were squeakings and chickenhouse sounds … Meadlo and the lieutenant were spraying gunfire into a crowd of villagers. They stood side by side, taking turns. Meadlo was crying … The air was hot and wet … He ran past a smoking bamboo schoolhouse. Behind him and in front of him, a brisk machine-gun wind pressed through Thuan Yen. The wind stirred up a powdery red dust that sparkled in the morning sunshine, and the little village had now gone mostly violet … Hutto was shooting corpses. T'Souvas was shooting children. Doherty and Terry were finishing off the wounded. This was not madness, Sorcerer understood. This was sin. He felt it winding through his own arteries, something vile and slippery like heavy black oil in a crankcase … A period of dark time went by, maybe an hour, maybe more … There were flies now – a low droning buzz that swelled up from somewhere deep inside the village.… and on it went.
Some of the notes are extended first-person ruminations, almost confessional in nature, about the author's experiences in Vietnam, his memories many years later, of those experiences, his fading memories, things he thinks he remembers, but isn't sure that he does.
The protagonists? Well, the novel is a romance, a love story. As near as the narrator can figure out. John and Kathy Wade. Madly in love, but somehow acting a little bit funny, are they really in love? The narrator speculates, delves into their thoughts, their own memories. Here he is, paradoxically, perhaps being the most reliable? Remember this author's insistence in The Things They Carried that the most true war stories are ones which never happened? Kind of the same thing here. Did the things remembered, or maybe remembered, happen? Does is matter? What are we being told about the human psyche, human memory, human love, human emotion, human fright, the attempt to forget, to hide from oneself things which may have been done, which seem to be remembered but which maybe never happened, at least in the way remembered.
One very reliable topic narrated here, as it winds its way increasingly into the story, is that of the Lake of the Woods.
Max. length 68 mi (109 km)
Max. width 59 mi (95 km)
Surface area 1,679 sq mi (4,348.6 km2)
Max. depth 210 ft (64 m)
Shore length excluding islands: 25,000 mi (40,000 km)
including islands: 65,000 mi (105,000 km)
number of islands: >14,500
Lying in the north country of Minnesota, and partially in two Canadian provinces, the Lake of the Woods is described in O'Brien's inimitable prose, as here: someone is steering a boat through this wilderness, beginning to realize that they have missed a known channel and are now somewhere in the lake that they have never been – and the wilderness, the trees, the dense forests on the islands, the water, the sun, the clouds – nothing shows any sign of being different, any likelihood of being a landmark, there are no signs, no cabins, no other boats, nothing …
(paraphrase) He brought the boat around and followed the shoreline in a generally westward direction, looking for a channel south. The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. He was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest … for a long time he followed the curving shoreline, moving at low throttle, watching the sun sink toward the trees straight ahead. The wind was colder. He passed between a pair of tiny islands, veered north to skirt a spit of rocks and sand, then aimed the boat into a wide stretch of choppy water. After more than an hour nothing much had changed. The purest wilderness, everything tangled up with everything else … A little island seemed to float before him in the purply twilight, partly masked by a stand of reeds and cattails …
Not an easy read. Yet couldn't put it down. Burned my fingers I think.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Previous review: Varieties of Disturbance Lydia Davis
Next review: The Open Boat and Other Stories Stephan Crane
More recent/Older review: ___
Previous library review: The Things They Carried
Next library review: A Firing Offense G Pelecanos
March 25, 2019
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
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
November 3, 2020
I read this for the first time nine years ago in the standard printed book. It was during a time that I was reading a lot of books that were connected with Vietnam. Although Vietnam was my war it was a war that I did not attend. In spite of that, it had a big impact on my life.
So here I am now listening to the audible book and following along with the Kindle book. Maybe I have by now escaped the mystery of how Vietnam actually impacted my life. But this book is about the mystery of another man and how it affected him and ultimately brought him To his knees.
It is a book that alternates between a man’s time in Vietnam and has connections to the infamous My Lai massacre. And the present day location is the Minnesota boundary waters. The events of 20 years ago Continue to haunt our protagonist. Just as they continue to hind the author of the book. The conclusion of the book is strangely formulated without a conclusion and with many of the important paragraphs strangely revealed in footnotes by the author speaking directly to the reader.
————————
It’s all here: Alcoholism; Abortion; Secrets; Magic; Politics; Death; Gambling; Vietnam; Suicide; Infidelity; Mystery; Murder; the Northwest Angle and More.
For me, any book that is about Vietnam is about a part of my life that is a mystery, an unknown. I avoided going there. Just barely. So all these books about Vietnam give me a glimpse of the horror that I missed. It would be easy to say “the horror that I fortunately missed” but should I write off the chance of a happy ending? Can a war have a happy ending? I don’t think so…
So here I am now listening to the audible book and following along with the Kindle book. Maybe I have by now escaped the mystery of how Vietnam actually impacted my life. But this book is about the mystery of another man and how it affected him and ultimately brought him To his knees.
It is a book that alternates between a man’s time in Vietnam and has connections to the infamous My Lai massacre. And the present day location is the Minnesota boundary waters. The events of 20 years ago Continue to haunt our protagonist. Just as they continue to hind the author of the book. The conclusion of the book is strangely formulated without a conclusion and with many of the important paragraphs strangely revealed in footnotes by the author speaking directly to the reader.
————————
It’s all here: Alcoholism; Abortion; Secrets; Magic; Politics; Death; Gambling; Vietnam; Suicide; Infidelity; Mystery; Murder; the Northwest Angle and More.
And suddenly, as though caught in a box of mirrors, John looked up to see his own image reflected on the clinic’s walls and ceiling. Fun-house reflections: deformations and odd angles. He saw a little boy doing magic. He saw a college spy, madly in love. He saw a soldier and husband and seeker of public office. He saw himself from inside out and upside down, the organic chemistry, the twisted chromosomes, and for a second it occurred to him that his own stability was at issue.
. . .
Across the beach Lux and Pat were huddled in conversation. Wade watched them for a few seconds, wondering if he should walk over and demand the handcuffs. Blurt out a few secrets. The teakettle and the boathouse. Tell them he wasn’t sure. Just once in his life: tell everything. Talk about his father. Explain how his whole life had been managed with mirrors and that he now was totally baffled and totally turned around and had no idea how to work his way out. Which was the truth. He didn’t know shit. He didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten there or where to go next.
. . .
Maybe that’s what this book is for. To remind me. To give me back my vanished life.
. . .
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?
For me, any book that is about Vietnam is about a part of my life that is a mystery, an unknown. I avoided going there. Just barely. So all these books about Vietnam give me a glimpse of the horror that I missed. It would be easy to say “the horror that I fortunately missed” but should I write off the chance of a happy ending? Can a war have a happy ending? I don’t think so…
March 20, 2011
O'Brien gives you the different options for an ending. Decide for yourself. Whichever you choose, after closing this book, you'd feel glad that you've read it. Extraordinary. There's nothing like this among the 400+ novels that I've read so far.
An ex-Vietnam War army turned politician, John Wade has lost his bid to the Senate. He and his wife, Kathy are debt up to their necks. Married for almost 2 decades, Kathy, 38, has been dreaming of having a baby. Busy with his career, John thinks that it is not yet the right time or maybe there is a deeper reason: his unhappy childhood or the secret of what happened in Vietnam. One day, John wakes up and finds that Kathy is gone.
When we got married, did we tell all the stories of our past to our spouse? If the answer is no, how did we choose which ones to tell and which ones to keep to ourselves? Now that we are married, how much of our lives do we share with our spouse? When we arrive home at night, do we tell each and every detail of our day? How do we choose which ones to tell and which ones to keep to ourselves?
"Kill Jesus!" is what John shouts in his dream. Beware guys, your secret can come out while you are dreaming and your wife is just there by your side wondering what those nightmares mean. So, even if you don't share everything, if it stinks, it will be known to her sooner or later.
This book was recommended to me by 3 of my friends here in Goodreads. Three ladies. Maybe they think that I would probably learn a lesson from what happened to John and Kathy *chuckle*. Just kidding. O'Brien writing style is exceptional: At least 5 stories run in parallel (current, Vietnam, college days, John's childhood days and what could have probably happened) plus those chapters on exhibits which are composed of excepts from interviews related to the investigation of Kathy's disappearance or the John's war criminal case and even related literatures (quotes from Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, for example) on those. Normally, in this kind of storytelling approach, I would be confused and it would take me a long time to finish the book, e.g., The Known World by Edward P. Jones, as a recent read. But here, reading was a breeze and totally enjoyable because of its fresh approach and it leaves you a space to think: interpret the story and choose the ending that you want to believe happened.
Thanks J, S, and T. Keep on recommending! :)
An ex-Vietnam War army turned politician, John Wade has lost his bid to the Senate. He and his wife, Kathy are debt up to their necks. Married for almost 2 decades, Kathy, 38, has been dreaming of having a baby. Busy with his career, John thinks that it is not yet the right time or maybe there is a deeper reason: his unhappy childhood or the secret of what happened in Vietnam. One day, John wakes up and finds that Kathy is gone.
When we got married, did we tell all the stories of our past to our spouse? If the answer is no, how did we choose which ones to tell and which ones to keep to ourselves? Now that we are married, how much of our lives do we share with our spouse? When we arrive home at night, do we tell each and every detail of our day? How do we choose which ones to tell and which ones to keep to ourselves?
"Kill Jesus!" is what John shouts in his dream. Beware guys, your secret can come out while you are dreaming and your wife is just there by your side wondering what those nightmares mean. So, even if you don't share everything, if it stinks, it will be known to her sooner or later.
This book was recommended to me by 3 of my friends here in Goodreads. Three ladies. Maybe they think that I would probably learn a lesson from what happened to John and Kathy *chuckle*. Just kidding. O'Brien writing style is exceptional: At least 5 stories run in parallel (current, Vietnam, college days, John's childhood days and what could have probably happened) plus those chapters on exhibits which are composed of excepts from interviews related to the investigation of Kathy's disappearance or the John's war criminal case and even related literatures (quotes from Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, for example) on those. Normally, in this kind of storytelling approach, I would be confused and it would take me a long time to finish the book, e.g., The Known World by Edward P. Jones, as a recent read. But here, reading was a breeze and totally enjoyable because of its fresh approach and it leaves you a space to think: interpret the story and choose the ending that you want to believe happened.
Thanks J, S, and T. Keep on recommending! :)
November 4, 2012
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.
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.
June 19, 2023
A powerful book. For once, the blurbs on the covers say it all--and I agree with them. The Wall Street Journal says it's "gracefully written." That it is. And that it's "gripping." Yes, it is. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time. For one thing, I was almost old enough to go to Vietnam. I don't know how I could have handled some of the situations that occurred over there....
March 25, 2018
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.
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 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.
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 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.
September 1, 2009
This is a real page turner, creatively beautiful and exquisitely styled. It is an exceedingly unsettling and disturbing tale weaving history and mystery together.
John Wade, is a 41 year old Viet Nam veteran whose recently failed Minnesota senatorial bid shatters his facade of success. As a child John was an illusionist and as an adult politician he honed these skills.
Seeking solace from defeat, John and his wife Kathy vacation in the deep Minnesota woods where John's tether to reality snaps. A veteran of the My Lai massacre, John's flashbacks merge with the present day in a frightening nightmare quality.
Late one night while boiling a kettle of water for tea, John decides to boil and kill the houseplants. Mentally disorganized and rapidly deteriorating, he vaguely remembers the possibility of walking down the hall to his wife's bedroom with another pot of boiling water...then awakens the next day to find her gone.
O'Brien is masterful in his ability to use the dark woods as a metaphor regarding inner secrets and demons, blending illusion with reality as we walk the slippery path of insanity with John in his search for truth.
five stars for this one!
John Wade, is a 41 year old Viet Nam veteran whose recently failed Minnesota senatorial bid shatters his facade of success. As a child John was an illusionist and as an adult politician he honed these skills.
Seeking solace from defeat, John and his wife Kathy vacation in the deep Minnesota woods where John's tether to reality snaps. A veteran of the My Lai massacre, John's flashbacks merge with the present day in a frightening nightmare quality.
Late one night while boiling a kettle of water for tea, John decides to boil and kill the houseplants. Mentally disorganized and rapidly deteriorating, he vaguely remembers the possibility of walking down the hall to his wife's bedroom with another pot of boiling water...then awakens the next day to find her gone.
O'Brien is masterful in his ability to use the dark woods as a metaphor regarding inner secrets and demons, blending illusion with reality as we walk the slippery path of insanity with John in his search for truth.
five stars for this one!
May 19, 2012
I like Tim O'Brien's writing style and this was a page-turner for the most part. I stumbled quite a bit on the excessive quotes throughout the book and struggled with too much repetition, especially the ghastly repetition of memories from Vietnam. The themes of rape and murder are constantly in your face. Perhaps his point was how often they were in the soldier's face during the war? Maybe, but I believe that enough horror exists in just *imagining* what happened. I wouldn't discount his writing or his genre, but this wasn't my favorite of his.
September 5, 2019
This was a very fucked up story, involving one seriously fucked up guy, a fucked up childhood, a fucked up marriage, and probably the most notoriously fucked up incident coming out of America's most fucked up war. I respect it as a piece of well-crafted literature, but I certainly can't say I enjoyed it.
March 16, 2014
To know is to be disappointed. To understand is to be betrayed. All the petty hows and whys, the unseemly motives, the abscesses of character, the sordid little ugliness of self and history – these were the gimmicks you kept under wraps to the end. Better to leave your audience wailing in the dark, shaking their fists, some crying How? , others Why?
Dreamlike & menacing O'Brien takes a tired plot and sets it alight. His creation - John Wade: soldier, stalker, politician, husband, The Sorcerer.
Did he kill his wife?
It is the author trickery that is to be admired: his use of repetition and rhythm unsettles, his hypothesis and evidence persuades but in the end none of that matters. This is a study on hunger, war, the cost of wanting what was never given, stealing love with tricks, the burden of blood - blood shared and blood spilt.
A fascinating read by an exciting writer. Recommend.
Dreamlike & menacing O'Brien takes a tired plot and sets it alight. His creation - John Wade: soldier, stalker, politician, husband, The Sorcerer.
Did he kill his wife?
It is the author trickery that is to be admired: his use of repetition and rhythm unsettles, his hypothesis and evidence persuades but in the end none of that matters. This is a study on hunger, war, the cost of wanting what was never given, stealing love with tricks, the burden of blood - blood shared and blood spilt.
A fascinating read by an exciting writer. Recommend.
April 12, 2021
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.
September 28, 2007
This is Exhibit A for the concept of "unreliable narrator" - rather than dropping clues along the way to revealing the answer to a mystery (in this case, why and how Kathy Wade, wife of recently disgraced politician John Wade, disappeared), In the Lake of the Woods draws out all of the possible hypotheses for the disappearance, gives evidence to back each one up - and then never gives you a definite resolution. It's a great use of literary technique, and a truly compelling read.
February 3, 2020
Superlative, this will get into my all-time top 20 reads. Full video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNn3j...
November 16, 2011
I'm not a writer by any means. I like to think that my head contains somewhat original thoughts. The process of transferring those thoughts into coherently structured paragraphs has always been a challenge for me. But I digress.
I was blown away. Definitely one of the best books I've ever read. It had the potential to be a jumbled, confusing mess of a novel, but O'Brien deftly preserves a perfect balance between mystery and romance. It really is a seamless and fluid combination of bitter memories and an even bitter reality, to the point where the boundaries of each are blurred. In spite of its nonlinear structure, the story, which switches from past to present and back again, does so with ease, never once spiraling into convolution. Deeply and carefully woven into the narrative is a sense of dread, especially the characters' relation to their northern Minnesotan surroundings. The lake is its own unique character. I didn't know what to expect, but I couldn't help but feel uneasy. Common are themes of isolation, obsession, remorse, marital distrust, political deception, repressed trauma, and above all the desire for love and acceptance; and in the last few chapters, these are all tied together in a way I didn't see coming. It is breathtaking and absolutely gorgeous.
I can't really put it into words. I tried, but I believed I have failed. This is a novel that must not only be read, but experienced. Tim O'Brien is a master storyteller.
(I reread this review a couple months after publishing it. It's subpar, to say the least. Man, I'm just not good with words, not as much as I'd like to.)
I was blown away. Definitely one of the best books I've ever read. It had the potential to be a jumbled, confusing mess of a novel, but O'Brien deftly preserves a perfect balance between mystery and romance. It really is a seamless and fluid combination of bitter memories and an even bitter reality, to the point where the boundaries of each are blurred. In spite of its nonlinear structure, the story, which switches from past to present and back again, does so with ease, never once spiraling into convolution. Deeply and carefully woven into the narrative is a sense of dread, especially the characters' relation to their northern Minnesotan surroundings. The lake is its own unique character. I didn't know what to expect, but I couldn't help but feel uneasy. Common are themes of isolation, obsession, remorse, marital distrust, political deception, repressed trauma, and above all the desire for love and acceptance; and in the last few chapters, these are all tied together in a way I didn't see coming. It is breathtaking and absolutely gorgeous.
I can't really put it into words. I tried, but I believed I have failed. This is a novel that must not only be read, but experienced. Tim O'Brien is a master storyteller.
(I reread this review a couple months after publishing it. It's subpar, to say the least. Man, I'm just not good with words, not as much as I'd like to.)
May 8, 2013
I love the unconventional structure of this book. The book starts with a mystery, and Tim O'Brien presents hypotheses - what might have happened, but we're never sure. I definitely have my theories of what probably happened and what I really wish had happened (which are different). The characterization and the writing in this book are superb. O'Brien uses the mystery and the hypotheses as a framework through which he explores the lives of the characters. This is the first "literary" novel I loved.
February 14, 2017
Whoa. This book is deep. It deserves the awards it has won. I don't know what it is about O'Brien's novels but they have a way of speaking to me, getting me in the gut. This book had the same effect. It's truly a disturbing story on so many levels. It's a story about the human condition and the big bag of mess that goes with living and dying.
January 9, 2012
While Denis Johnson's 'Tree of Smoke' may be the single best American novel about the Vietnam war, Tim O'Brien, who has made writing 'Nam stories into something of a cottage industry, has put out three terrific books that, taken as a whole, achieve something far more compelling and significant. The first, 'The Things They Carried,' is an extremely personal look into the dehumanization and commodification of the war, told with faux-bureaucratic detachment as a series of inventory lists. The second, 'Going after Cacciato,' is a surreal black farce, the 'Catch-22' of its generation. 'In the Lake of the Woods,' by contrast is set decades after the war, and deals with its irreversible aftereffects. In a worst-case scenario of PTSD, a seemingly successful veteran abruptly and spectacularly melts down in a tragedy of epic proportions. This ostensible war hero, an up-and-coming politician, was a participant in some particularly horrendous wartime carnage, and 20 years of denial has only succeeded in boiling his guilt down into a corrosive, explosive concentrate. Unlike Johnson, O'Brien is a Vietnam veteran, and it shows - not in portraying the details of the wartime experience, which Johnson nails just as accurately, or even in the moral ambiguities of war, but rather in the very specific ways that it annihilates the moral compass and makes men go mad.
October 16, 2013
So far I'm intrigued and also horrified at the flash backs descriptions of the war in Vietnam that is revealed through the main protagonist! Hard to comprehend such depravity of the purely evil wartime actions depicted.
*****Finished***
That said; the writing was crisp, vivid, and chilling! The mental ravages of 'insanity killing' in the trenches echoes throughout the book. The jarring perversity of it all leaves the reader (this reader anyway) with disturbing questions?
What was real and what was a sleight of the hand trick of deception and repression?
How many layers of cloaked pretense can be applied before the veneer cracks...the facade peels away and truth falls freely to emerge appallingly heinous?
How does the author present it?... the protagonist handle it?...the reader make sense of it???
It is a book full of meaning and hidden meaning, multilayered, complex, raw, intense, yet coated with an ever burning need to be accepted, recognized and loved!
I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the human spirit's basic survival tactics under duress and what depravity and horrific events can do to the human mental functions under extreme conditions.
It is a book that will haunt you and awaken you at the same time!
*****Finished***
That said; the writing was crisp, vivid, and chilling! The mental ravages of 'insanity killing' in the trenches echoes throughout the book. The jarring perversity of it all leaves the reader (this reader anyway) with disturbing questions?
What was real and what was a sleight of the hand trick of deception and repression?
How many layers of cloaked pretense can be applied before the veneer cracks...the facade peels away and truth falls freely to emerge appallingly heinous?
How does the author present it?... the protagonist handle it?...the reader make sense of it???
It is a book full of meaning and hidden meaning, multilayered, complex, raw, intense, yet coated with an ever burning need to be accepted, recognized and loved!
I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the human spirit's basic survival tactics under duress and what depravity and horrific events can do to the human mental functions under extreme conditions.
It is a book that will haunt you and awaken you at the same time!
June 22, 2016
Like his The Things They Carried, this is another meditation on the haunting effect of Vietnam on a generation of Americans and on the national and individual psyche. The narrative is cleverly layered so that it's a while before it becomes clear where the heart of the book lies. On the surface, this is the story of a failed politician and the disappearance of his wife. Only as the layers are peeled back do we see that is also a tale of the needy, wounded psyche of Wade, both fictional individual and a kind of Everyman.
O'Brien writes plain, clean, direct prose but the story he tells is oblique and complicated. Here he uses chapters of hypotheses as well as interviews and multi-time narratives to create a sense of mystery and tension, of possibilities that open up the story rather than closing it down to a defined and resolved ending.
This probably isn't for anyone who wants definitive closure and a completed sense of what happened: but if you enjoy challenging literature that engages the reader and treats her as an intelligent participant in the act of story-telling, then this is potent and satisfying.
O'Brien writes plain, clean, direct prose but the story he tells is oblique and complicated. Here he uses chapters of hypotheses as well as interviews and multi-time narratives to create a sense of mystery and tension, of possibilities that open up the story rather than closing it down to a defined and resolved ending.
This probably isn't for anyone who wants definitive closure and a completed sense of what happened: but if you enjoy challenging literature that engages the reader and treats her as an intelligent participant in the act of story-telling, then this is potent and satisfying.
October 3, 2014
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.
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