Reading notes on "In the Lake of the Woods"

Reading Notes: Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods
April 11, 2009

"In the Lake of the Woods" is a mystery novel of sorts, but one in which the mystery gets deeper as secrets are revealed.

As a boy, the rising politician John Wade takes refuge in magic tricks, practicing illusions before a mirror in the basement of his house. As he grows up, he internalizes the mirror and lives by illusion.

In Vietnam, where he is part of the company led by Lieutenant Calley that massacred civilians at My Lai (a secret he tries to hide from the public as well as himself) he is known as "Sorcerer."

Structure of the book is multifold: 1) chapters that describe "What" happened after Kathy's disappearance; 2) retrospective chapters on the "Nature" of John Wade's experiences as son, lover, soldier, politician, and suspect; 3) chapters that assemble "Evidence" in the form of passages from histories, public documents, quotes from characters in the novel, professional texts, literary works, lists of the contents of "John Wade's Box of Tricks"; and 4) "Hypothesis" chapters on what might have happened to Kathy.

John's repressed rage: "All that rage. Like an infection it seemed -- some terrible virus that kept multiplying within him." The night of Kathy's disappearance, his poltical career in tatters, he mutters again and again "Kill Jesus," pours boiling-hot water on houseplants (an act of deforestation?).

John lives by magic; Kathy by order and logic: "And then, for fifteen minutes over a second cup of coffee, she sat at the kitchen table with her book of crossword puzzles. She liked to start each day with a sense of accomplishment, solving what could be solved."

John, when his external success, his guise in the world has been demolished: "The mental scaffolding was gone, all the dreams for himself, all the fine illusions and ambitions."

John's coping mechanism: "Long ago, as a kid, he'd learned the secret of making his mind into a blackboard. Erase the bad stuff. Draw in pretty new pictures."

John deploys "tricks," mental and social, to repress the atrocities in which he was involved in Vietnam and the trauma of his father's suicide.

From his early youth, John perfects the skill of hiding behind the "mirrors" in his head -- illusions of normality. He is aware of the fakery, saying to himself that "his whole life had been managed with mirrors."

John's heroism and battle wounds, his political career, his marriage all a form of "apology" of atonement, for what he did in Vietnam.

John's ideal of love is a kind of disappearance. He speaks of wanting to disappear within Kathy and, observing in Vietnam two snakes eating each others' tails, he imagines the ultimate magic of 1 + 1 equalling zero. Later, after Kathy's disappearance -- and contemplating a suicide like his father's -- he sees nature as a place where that same math could prevail.

John irked by Kathy's gambling in Vegas; as a magician, John has no tolerance of chance.

Novel of secrets: the ones that you don't tell others (the abortion) and, more dire, the ones you repress -- the ones you don't tell to yourself (My Lai).

Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground" quoted as "Evidence": "Every man has some reminiscenses which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away . . . Man is bound to lie about himself."

In the "Evidence" sections, O'Brien connects politics to war, Vietnam to eradication of Native American populations, magic to denial, repression of memory to performance.

Notable (too easy?) that the Native American in Calley's company, Thinbill, is the only character who doesn't participate in the massacre.

In reference to John Wade's "Sorcerer" identity, Justin Kaplan quoted as "Evidence": "By taking a new name . . . an unfinished person may hope to enter into more dynamic -- but not necessarily more intimate -- transactions, both with the world outside and with his or her 'true soul,' the naked self." [An intersting thought in our age of avatars].

Assigned to administrative duty toward the end of his tour, "Sorcerer" makes his involvement in My Lai disappear by altering company records.

The failure of John's political "trick" of trying to make his past vanish: "He'd tried to pull off a trick that couldn't be done, which was to remake himself, to vanish what was past and replace it with things good and new. He should've known better. Should've lifted it out of the act. Never given the fucking show in the first place."

Intentionally or not, living or dead, Kathy has pulled a vanishing act -- her own feat of magic.

The final "Nature" chapter has Kathy dead (accident? murder? there are "Hypotheses" to cover both) at the bottom of "Lake of the Woods." So Kathy, and her death are now part of John's past along with the other incidents in the "Nature" chapters.

Yet the last "Hypothesis" chapter provides, perversely, a happy ending."

The narrator reflects: "Our own children, our fathers' our wives and husbands: Do we truly know them? How much is camoflage? How much is guessed at? How many lies get told and when, and about what? . . . How often do we lie awake speculating -- seeking some hidden truth? Oh yes, it gnaws at me. I have my own secrets, my own trapdoors. I know something about deceit. Far too much. How it coreodes and corrupts"

As for John Wade: "Can we believe he was not a monster but a man? That he was innocent of everything except his life? Could the truth be so simple? So terrible?"

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