THE EDGE magazine | Book reviews | Tim O'Brien

In the Lake of the Woods
Tim O'Brien
Flamingo paperback, 352 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1995)

There must be something more about Vietnam. It has to be something beyond the first rock'n'roll war. It has to go beyond the hallucinogens and psychedelics of battle. It must surpass incomprehension at fighting an aggressive capitalist war on the other side of the globe. It must even be more than just losing. It's a ghost the American psyche cannot lay.

Veteran Tim O'Brien writes novels about it. Even in those ostensibly not about the war - and In the Lake of the Woods is not - he is still writing a Vietnam novel. In The Lake of the Woods is about failure, about falling from great heights; something America knows well enough.

John Wade is a failure. He strove for the greatest heights of political office - the Senate, the White House - and was beaten by his own past. With his wife Kathy, he retreats to a cabin by a lake near the Canadian border, stuffs the telephone under the kitchen sink and retires into numb self-pity.

Then Kathy vanishes. She's there one evening, and the next morning gone. Their boat is gone too. A search is mounted but neither Kathy nor the boat are ever seen again. What remains is mystery. O'Brien makes it plain that there is no solution, no pat explanation. Life, he seems to say, does not mirror art. The last page does not always have all the answers.

O'Brien's methods are at once intricate and remarkably lucid. Into the central narrative he injects flashbacks to Wade's political manoeuvrings, to college courtship, and most tellingly to Vietnam. Wade was once a junior magician, and O'Brien cleverly weaves throughout his story the man's sleight of hand in South East Asia (where the men called him Sorcerer) to make whole villages disappear in firestorms, his own part in the massacre at My Lai vanish, and now the final trick - the one he can't understand - of conjuring his own wife's disappearance.

Further to that, the author loads the book with chapters of Evidence - quotes from those involved in the search, trial testimony from My Lai - and Hypothesis, positing a string of possible accounts for Kathy's disappearance, from accident to flight to Wade's brutal, despairing murder. The possibilities work remarkably well, and it's only toward the end, where O'Brien senses the difficulty of a book with no end, that he overdoes it (extensive footnotes litter these pages) in search of profundity and narrowly avoids toppling the whole novel. The book flounders in the lake itself. Where it works best is, inevitably, back in Vietnam where O'Brien coldly, clinically recites a litany of calm atrocities, allowing men to rape, mutilate and slaughter whole villages as a job of work.

Ultimately the book's very irresolution is its strength - the perpetual open-endedness the war has bequeathed to America - but one is left feeling cheated by the last thirty odd pages, as though O'Brien hasn't quite the courage of his convictions. In the Lake of the Woods is a deft, provocative novel that at the final hurdle seems content to exchange that for compromise. •

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