In the lake of the woods Tim O'Brien

IN THE LAKE OF THE WOODS
Tim O’Brien

A critical paper by
Leigh Fabens

"I'm not pretending,"  Spec Four Paul Berlin tells himself. "I'm not dreaming. It's real - if you can imagine it, it's real." Tim O'Brien, like Paul Berlin, the daydreamer in his 1978 novel Going After Cacciato, believes in the reality of the imagination. We live in our heads. What we imagine is just as real as what we know in any other sense. With our imaginations we impose order on chaos and we find causes; man is a causal animal, O'Brien told an interviewer. We understand in terms of histories - personal histories, political histories. To find the motive for a person's behavior, we search for causes in his past. We do the same thing with political history.

With tonight's novel, I believe Tim O'Brien has reached a certain climax in his growth as a novelist, and in particular a climax with the material he has mined before in two major novels and a memoir: the American involvement in the Vietnam War. He has put his imagination to work on an episode that is ultimately unimaginable, a chaos that resists the imposition of order and explanation, a sin for which there seems to be no forgiveness - the My Lai massacre.

We don't know that My Lai figures in the story until we're well into the book. We may suspect it, but the first confirmation comes on page 104 with the mention of Lt. Calley, [a name familiar to probably everyone in this room. (One question for discussion might be the recognition factor - how many of the signals can be understood by readers 30 and under?) ] O'Brien shows us two sides of this atrocity. On the one hand, it is an event so terrible that John Wade erases the documentary record of his involvement, hides it from his wife, his campaign manager, and almost hides it from himself. On the other side, My Lai is a commonplace. The Vietnam War was not a different kind of war. American soldiers were not faced with unprecedented muddles.  The American Revolutionary War and the Battle of Little Big Horn are cited – or suggested – as parallels.

But it is not My Lai, or Vietnam generally, that grabs our attention in the early chapters. There is a mystery, a disappearance, at the core of this tightly structured novel. What happened to Kathy Wade? Is she lost? drowned? murdered? The evidence – the bits and shreds, as well as the hypotheses which the author provides – allow the reader to decide. How many of you are ready to tell the rest of us what you think – what did happen to Kathy Wade?

I'll tell you what I think:  her disappearance is a trick. It isn't the real issue; it's a fictional red herring. Like Kathy with her crossword puzzles, we'd like to solve this with the evidence at hand, but we're heading up the wrong channel if we pursue it. We're as helpless and as clueless as Kathy Wade is in the Lake of the Woods, if she was indeed there in the boat, poking around trying to find Angle Inlet, trying to find her way back. We're on the wrong track if we read this book as a whodunit, piecing the evidence together, trying to solve the mystery the author invented for us and left unsolved. And we're on another wrong track if we read it as the story of a politician whose shameful past is finally catching up with him.

Tim O'Brien is letting us choose not to consider what happened in Vietnam by offering a domestic alternative. He's made it possible for us to look the other way because he's thrown us a bone, the fictional disappearance of Kathy Wade, the fictional wife of the fictional protagonist in a work of fiction. The problem with all this fiction is that, for a novel with a mystery at its core, O'Brien has given us a pile of evidence and a tight structure. In spite of the missing clues that would give us a definitive solution, the connections are so carefully plotted that as a reader I have to believe there is a connection between Kathy Wade's disappearance and what happened to American soldiers in Vietnam. And I have to believe that O'Brien wants us to see that there are similarities between Vietnam and domestic politics, and that Vietnam was not unlike other wars.

In a similar manner, Americans were able to avoid facing the reality of Vietnam because we were preoccupied with the domestic fallout from the war. Politically and socially, there was plenty to worry about. When our soldiers returned home, we by and large ignored them. When the events at My Lai came to light, it was no longer possible to look the other way, but many dismissed the episode as an example of temporary insanity, or extraordinarily amoral behavior, soldiers running amok. O'Brien tells us it was not so extraordinary – My Lai was more of a commonplace than any of us would like to think.

In the Lake of the Woods is a fictional biography of John Wade, the John Doe of his generation. At the end of the book the author asks us if we can believe that he was "not a monster but a man...innocent of everything except his life?" A frightening conclusion – we are responsible for our lives, and we can't use the insanity defense.

The narrator intersperses varieties of information in the construction of this biography: straightforward and seemingly indisputable accounts of what happened to John Wade and his wife – the How and What chapters. "The Nature of" chapters are generally more analytical; we read the kind of history that "explains" more than the bare facts – the kind of information that might make us think we understand the subject of the biography. In "The Nature of Marriage," (Chapter 7) for instance, we learn about the way John stalked Kathy when they were both students; we also begin to learn some of the details from his tour of duty in Vietnam.

"Evidence" chapters give us bits and shreds of evidence - but evidence of what? The author, in a footnote, reminds us that evidence is not truth, and if we want solutions we won't find them in these pages. It is the reader's book now – the author is not going to tell us what he intended us to think. The collected evidence is part fiction – as in the quotes from John Wade's mother, lists of what belonged to him, "interviews" with minor characters in the book. Other bits and shreds are documentary – transcript records, selections from a handbook on magic, quotes from a wide range of writers – the memoirs of Alexandre Dumas hint at the reason for the "Kill Jesus" curse. It occurred to me, too late, that I ought to have checked the references to the Calley Court Martial. Like the citations from the post-trauma stress disorder expert, the biographies of Wilson, Nixon and Johnson, and the references to the American Revolutionary War, they looked perfectly well supported. This is a work of fiction, but I believe it's "real" when I see the dates and numbers.

Finally, there are Hypothesis chapters, in which the author gives us a number of plausible explanations for Kathy's disappearance. Given what we know from the rest of the fictional biography, any one of them could be believed. By the end of the novel, when we read the boiling hypothesis, we've been prepared for it. We might have thought of it before O'Brien makes it explicit, by making connections and suppositions from hints about the teakettle, steam coming from her eyes, the corroborated evidence of the dead plants. And by the time we read that chapter, we know enough about what can and did happen to Vietnam vets to believe that it's possible. In footnotes to the final Hypothesis chapter, the narrator first rejects the "boil" as graceless, disgusting, and countermanded by the evidence that John was "crazy" about her, then reconsiders – on the other hand, "there's no accounting for taste. It's a judgment call."

These notes to the reader have grown more candid, from "don't look for solutions" to his aesthetic rejection of the boil hypothesis, by which he reminds us that the story of John and Kathy Wade is all fiction. It's as if a magician hid his methods from his audience until the last trick, when he shows us how it's done. The lady doesn't really get sawed in half, and here's how.

But the moral core of this novel is firmly set in a documented reality – the Vietnam War and specifically, the massacre at My Lai. We don't have to check the references for page numbers to remember that it happened, and there was a court martial. Interspersed with the accounts of John Wade's fictional life – his unhappy childhood, his courtship and marriage, his political career – we read about the part of his life he tried to erase from his memory. Psychologically, we can understand why people forget trauma. Natural defenses – there is justification. What John Wade can't repress is his imagination; the mental pictures show themselves inside his head, and he sees replays of March 16, 1968 over and over again. O'Brien gives us the material to imagine it for ourselves, and the scene is replayed from varying angles throughout the book, like a recurring nightmare we don't deserve.

Wade "sees," in his mind's eye, the old man with the hoe tumbling through the air, or Weatherby in front of him at the ditch. These spectres haunt him in his waking consciousness as often as in his dreams. Each time we read about them, we get a sense of the aimlessness and chaos of that day – the sound of buzzing flies tormenting Thinbill, the smells driving another to the brink, the sunlight blurring all perception for Wade. At the beginning of the most complete account of the massacre, "The Nature of the Beast" chapter, Wade is unequivocal: "This was not madness ... this was sin." By the end of the chapter, things get blurred. His memory falters, but he remembers thinking the hoe was a rifle, and who was Weatherby? The enemy? Who was the enemy? Killing his fellow American made as much sense as killing the Vietnamese.

What makes this novel so dark is the responsibility without the redemption. There are justifications, there is information which leads to understanding which might lead to forgiveness but doesn't always. On the minor points, yes – we can understand that politicians had unhappy childhoods and in their campaigns they beg for love. We can understand the universal fascination with magic, with believing that natural law can be outwitted. We know that keeping secrets is not a good way to live one's life or one's marriage.

But the inescapable point is the personal responsibility for good and evil. What does "Kill Jesus" mean? no hope for redemption. The war is insane, therefore we're not guilty? O'Brien has stacked the evidence – the insanity defense won't work. It is not madness, it's sin.