The more I read of Tim O’Brien, the more I respect his gift for the craft of writing. Not merely the way he can create an aura of tension which explodes in a simple phrase, or his knack for finding the right words for description; In the Lake of the Woods features a description of a character “building” a vodka tonic, which is perfectly suited to the tone of the moment. These things alone would be nearly enough for me to climb onto this soap-box and claim O’Brien as genius, but it the way that he draws attention to things like memory, the art of storytelling and all the little sins we cannot help but commit as humans that force me to rank him as one of the best authors currently at work.
In the Lake of the Woods is an odd book, with an almost palpable air of menace surrounding it. It’s almost a mystery novel, but nothing is really solved, and that is the better part of the point. It’s almost a love story, but there is all this menace and these hidden secrets.
Title: In the Lake of the Woods
Author: Tim O’Brien
LC Rating:
The story is simple on it’s surface, a senatorial candidate badly loses an election after revelations about atrocities in Vietnam are made public. He retreats with his wife to a cabin where they are trying to patch together their marriage and their future when she suddenly disappears without a trace.
The text is a combination of hypothesis, flashback and evidence. A number of different possibilities about her disappearance are given narrative form, we slowly learn bits and pieces of their history and running underneath all of this is a small, almost unheard voice of the person who actually put the book together by interviewing everyone who could shed light on the mystery. This character speaks only in the footnotes, a fact which I found a little bit odd and one that didn’t sit quite right when balanced against the tone of the book. Then I read the last chapter, and it turned suddenly brilliant.
In the Lake of the Woods, is much more than clever literary gimmicks, it calls out the human spirit for a good close exploration and does not shy away when ugliness emerges. What is truly remarkable is that it still manages to attain beauty, of course I am willing to admit that what struck me as beautiful would cause another reader to cringe, but we’re all working on a sliding scale of morality and what we feel humans are capable of.
All that said, O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried is superior to In the Lake of the Woods, and I will be crafting a review of that incredible tome at some point, I’m still in a process of close reading as it is one of the texts I’m studying at school, and I am in the process of finding and comparing different interpretations.
Even this review of In the Lake of the Woods feels soft to me, I just finished reading it and am still rolling in the waves of the feeling it engendered. I will say this, having read two of his books now, I can say without hesitation that Tim O’Brien is one of the most interesting and innovative authors I have come across in a very long time. Well worth reading.