THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 13, 1994 TAG: 9411080540
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAN DEGREGORY
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines
IN THE LAKE OF THE WOODS
TIM O'BRIEN
Houghton Mifflin. 306 pp. $21.95.
We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest to us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.
- EDITH WHARTON
In the Lake of the Woods is at once a stark depiction of the wilderness that is the human psyche, a metaphoric mine field dotting the path to truth and responsibility, and a horrifying account of how the mind struggles with reality-vs.-actuality to purge a stained soul.
Author Tim O'Brien has written five previous books, including the 1979 National Book Award winner Going After Cacciato and, most recently, The Things They Carried, awarded the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Melcher Book Award and France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Esquire, Playboy, The New Republic and the Saturday Review.
A native of Worthington, Minn., O'Brien graduated in 1968 from Macalester College in St. Paul. From 1969 to '70, he served as a foot soldier in Vietnam. His unit's area of operation included the village of My Lai, site of a civilian massacre one year before his arrival. In the Lake of the Woods deals in part with this event and its aftermath.
Minnesota Democrat John Wade, a twice-toured Vietnam vet, has methodically mapped a political career that has all but secured his bid for the U.S. Senate - that is, until 11th-hour revelations unearth sordid skeletons in his past. A textbook manipulator and ``control freak,'' Wade finds himself face to face with the emotional letdown of a crushing defeat, an unraveling marriage and inescapable nightmares and flashbacks to his tour of duty. He retreats with his wife, Kathy, to a cottage on a remote lake in the northern Minnesota wilderness. Within days, Kathy vanishes without a trace, leaving Wade alone to confront his demons.
Gradually it is understood that Wade was one of 105 American soldiers present in My Lai on March 16, 1968, when the atrocities, routinely summoned like an evil beast through Wade's mind's eye, occurred. O'Brien renders the events of the infamous My Lai incident painfully real through vivid description and stunning detail, a veritable testament to the deep-seated evil manifest in the recesses of the human psyche.
But Kathy Wade has tragic secrets of her own. As a massive search of the isolated lakes region yields no clues as to her whereabouts, Wade's repeated claim that he knows nothing about her disappearance arouses suspicion. Meanwhile, Wade's past is reconstructed by an anonymous narrator in a series of speculations and hypotheses. Fragment by fragment, a tapestry of truth is woven to reconstruct what really happened in both Vietnam and Minnesota. All the while, questions and possibilities abound.
Tim O'Brien is an electrifying storyteller, a craftsman of the fictional form and a rhetorical master. While the pretext to In the Lake of the Woods introduces the book as a fictitious account of narrative history, the compelling nature of both character and style within an ever-shifting time sequence makes it almost impossible to separate fact from fiction, and reality from what the mind has conjured as actuality.
O'Brien's extensive use of footnotes in various chapters titled ``Evidence'' is an unusual strategy that encourages the perception of fact. Indeed, O'Brien draws from history and his own experience to alter or reimagine real events. The characters in Minnesota and Vietnam are poignantly drawn stereotypes, who make it remarkably easy to suspend disbelief about both cast and content. If the revealing character introductions don't establish the players' roles, the extensive, quick-hitting dialogue, rich in personality, does.
Chapters are numerous and brief - rarely a dozen pages or more - often encompassing three or more shifts in time. As a result, In the Lake of the Woods is a dynamic read, chock-full of tension, expectation, speculation and a burning desire for resolution. Skilled with diction, O'Brien uses metaphors and analogies sparingly but powerfully.
In the Lake of the Woods is captivating and compelling. O'Brien, a true artist, has redefined the human self and has cast unmistakable shadows of doubt over the mind's ability to govern that self. MEMO: Dan DeGregory, a former speech communication instructor, is a musician
and editor who lives in Nags Head.
ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
Photo
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- Excerpt from interview with John Marshall, Seattle
Post-Intelligencer
[For complete text, please see microfilm]
by CNB