In the Lake of the Woods

Hello readers and welcome to installment number five of Another Year of Fiction (AYOF). After taking on All Quiet on the Western Front I decided to pivot to a Minnesota author who is rapidly becoming a favorite of mine: Tim O’Brien. In this case I chose his landmark 1994 novel In the Lake of the Woods.
 
While I’m not sure it’s quite as brilliant as The Things They Carried, this book is without a doubt an incredible piece of fiction masquerading as fact. The story, about a Minnesota politician residing in a remote cabin with his wife after being soundly defeated in a primary, is deceptively simple, but O’Brien weaves his narrator through the pieces of the puzzle, offering explanations as to what may have happened. The chief characters are John Wade and his wife Kathy, but we meet a dozen others through the course of their lives, and also as pieces of “evidence” the narrator has assembled for our viewing. The story is intricately told and kept me riveted until the end. But more on all these themes in the lessons I took away from this monumental work:
 

1. Use of language. This is probably O’Brien’s greatest skill set, and he displays it well. Every setting is teeming with description, just as each character is deeply layered and plagued with emotions that threaten to boil over. The narrator uses his own storytelling skills to play out various hypotheses, building upon what we’ve read already in the evidence.
2. The idea of the novel. This is a huge reason why this novel works on so many levels. O’Brien breaks the story into various parts, the “evidence” sections being merely quotations from fictional interviews conducted mixed with citations of actual books and government documents. This intermingling of fact and fiction, the line of which seems more blurry than ever in Trumpland, resonates within what could be a very real story about a political couple and their broken marriage.
3. You don’t have to resolve everything. No, you do not. And not every writer is going to agree with this one. But it’s hard to argue when the narrative gives you so many desperate options to ponder throughout its pages. While the narrator seems to profess more consideration for one out of his many possible conclusions, at the end of the book we remain in doubt as to what happened to these two people. The story is so incredibly well told, closure doesn’t even matter.

 
If you can’t tell from my effusive praise, I very much enjoyed reading this novel, and would highly recommend it. There is a reason O’Brien is consistently cited as one of the best wranglers of the written word over the past few decades, and has miles to teach within his books. I hope to be able to visit all of his works over the coming years.
 
Up next, I’m going to take a bit of a break before I dive into what will be my summer read: Stephen King’s gigantic 2009 novel Under the Dome. I hope to also hit a short story collection or two, and get some of my own written. Have a safe and fun season everyone, and thanks for reading!​