Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
On
its surface, In the Lake of the Woods suggests
the classic locked-room mystery turned on its head.
Sometime between the night and late morning of September
19, 1986, a woman vanishes near Lake of the Woods in
northern Minnesota, "where the water was everything,
vast and very cold, and where there were secret channels
and portages and bays and tangled forests and islands
without names." While the traditional locked-room
mystery presents investigators - and readers - with the
seemingly impossible, the disappearance of Kathy Wade
poses too many possibilities, a wilderness of hypotheses.
There are too many places she could have gone, too many
things that could have happened to her.
ABOUT THE
TITLE
As Tim O'Brien gradually reveals in this haunting,
morally vertiginous novel, there were too many reasons
for Kathy to vanish. All of them are connected to her
husband, John, an attractive if morally confused
40-year-old politician whose career has lately ended in a
defeat so humiliating that it has driven the Wades to an
isolated cabin in the Minnesota woods.
A long-buried secret has resurfaced to bury John
alive; perhaps it has buried Kathy along with him. John's
disgrace originated in "a place with secret
trapdoors and tunnels and underground chambers populated
by various spooks and goblins, a place where magic was
everyone's hobby...a place where the air itself was both
reality and illusion, where anything might instantly
become anything else."
Its geographic epicenter is the village of Thuan Yen
in Vietnam. It was there, eighteen years before, that
John Wade was transformed from a boy with a gift for
performing magic tricks (his platoon-mates knew him as
"Sorcerer") into an entranced killer.
What happened at Thuan Yen was not fiction. The events
that took place there were widely reported and documented
in official U.S. Army hearings and are known today as the
My Lai massacre. At the heart of In the Lake of the
Woods is its brutal re-creation of this wound in
John Wade's history and his country's. Because Wade was
one of many killers, Tim O'Brien intersperses his
narrative with the testimony of real figures like
Lieutenant Rusty Calley and U.S. Army Investigator
William V. Wilson--not to mention Presidents Richard
Nixon and Woodrow Wilson. Just as John's and Kathy's
associates--his mother and campaign manager, her sister
and co-worker--try to decipher the events at Lake of
the Woods, those historical witnesses posit partial
explanations for America's mysteriously aligned
obsessions with politics and violence.
Clausewitz observed that war is the continuation of
politics by other means. Tim O'Brien suggests that
politics, at least in its American variety, is a
continuation of needs more basic and more terrible even
than the need for power. The craving for love, he reminds
us, can drive the human soul toward acts of desperation,
deceit, and even violence.
For O'Brien, as for the unnamed investigator who is
his narrator, all explanations are hypotheses rather than
proofs. Beyond the mystery of Kathy's disappearance and
John's role in it, and even beyond the mystery of My Lai,
are other riddles: What predisposed John to become a
murderer? What sort of magic enabled him to make his past
vanish for twenty years, and what disappeared along with
it? How could he love Kathy with such self-annihilating
ferocity while keeping an essential part of himself
hidden from her? Was Kathy a victim of John's deceptions
or a participant in them? Is John an autonomous moral
agent or another victim-of a bad childhood or a bad war
or the murderous pastel sunlight of Vietnam? With In
the Lake of the Woods, O'Brien has reinvented the
novel as a magician's trick box equipped with an infinite
number of false bottoms. Kathy's disappearance remains a
"magnificent giving over to pure and absolute
Mystery." John believes that "to know is to be
disappointed. To understand is to be betrayed." This
brave and troubling novel neither betrays nor
disappoints, but brings the reader into a direct
confrontation with the insoluble enigmas of history,
character, and evil.
ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Minnesota native Tim O'Brien graduated from
Macalester College in St. Paul in 1968. He served as a
foot soldier in Vietnam from February 1969 to March 1970.
Following his military service, he went to graduate
school in Government at Harvard University, then later
worked as a national affairs reporter for The
Washington Post.
O'Brien is the author of the novel Going After
Cacciato, winner of the 1979 National Book Award for
fiction, and of The Things They Carried, winner
of the 1990 Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in
fiction. Its title story, first published in Esquire,
received the 1987 National Magazine Award in fiction.
His other books are If I Die in a Combat Zone,
Northern Lights, and The Nuclear Age.
His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including
Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy,
McCall's, Granta, Harper's, Redbook,
The New Republic, Ploughshares, Gentleman's
Quarterly, and Saturday Review. His short
stories have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize
Stories (1976, 1978, 1982), Great Esquire
Fiction, Best American Short Stories (1978,
1987), The Pushcart Prize (Vols. II and X), and
in many textbooks and collections. He has received awards
from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment
for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Arts and Humanities
Foundation.
In The Lake of the Woods was selected by the
editors of The New York Times Book Review as one
of the best books of 1994.
AUTHOR
INTERVIEW
Q: How did you come to write In
the Lake of the Woods? Did you know the whole story
from the beginning, or did you start with a particular
premise or image?
A: I certainly did not know the whole
story. It would've killed my own interest and
curiosity--like going to a movie after someone has given
away its conclusion. I began In the Lake of the Woods
with the scene on the porch. An image of two very
unhappy people, lost in the fog, lost in a deep spiritual
and psychological way. As a writer, I had to discover bit
by bit the causes of their immense despair, just as the
reader does. Discovery is one of the great joys for both
the reader and the writer.
Q: One of the problems this novel
poses is that the reader is asked to like--or at least
empathize with--a character who is, at the very least,
severely damaged, addicted to subterfuge and guilty of
terrible acts during the Vietnam War. Was this something
that worried you as you wrote? How did you compensate for
it?
A: It didn't worry me. One of the
things I've never understood is the complaint that
such-and-such a character is "unlikable." The
figures in fiction I respond to most powerfully are those
I don't necessarily like or even identify with:
Raskolnikov, or Abraham, or Bartleby, or Captain Ahab, or
Anna Karenina, or Emma Bovary, or Lady Macbeth, or Jake
Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, another man
damaged by a war. Who wants to go out for a beer with
Lady Macbeth? Yet when I read about such characters, I'm
pulled along by their spiritual and moral problems; I'm
often rooting for them to emerge whole from the
blackness. Wade is one of those characters. I find myself
rooting for him, wishing him the best, even as his life
gets bleaker and bleaker, as he keeps making bad choices.
But then, sometimes people don't have absolute freedom of
choice. Life and history impose constraints on all of us.
In Wade's case--a childhood like his, a history like
his--the freedom to choose has been limited by an
overwhelming need to be loved, at almost any cost. So I
have sympathy for him. He's a man in great trouble.
There's a piece of John Wade inside each of us, I think.
We don't have to like it, but we would be wise to
acknowledge it.
Q: Speaking of guilt, is John Wade
responsible for what happened at Thuan Yen? Are the
terrible things that happened to him in combat--and
earlier during his childhood - meant to justify or even
explain his conduct? Do you believe that William Calley
had a story of his own that might mitigate his guilt? Is
something like the My Lai massacre fully explicable in
terms of individual pathology?
A: We're all responsible for our
actions in the world, and John Wade is responsible for
his. Unfortunately, he can't own up to his sins and
failures and weaknesses. He not only hides them from
others but from himself, as so many of us do. Even as
Wade tries to atone for his past by entering politics as
a progressive Democrat, he's drawing a veil over his own
misdeeds and so is both perpetuating and compounding all
his guilt. There's a difference between explanation and
exculpation. One can point to all sorts of reasons why
people like Calley did what they did: fear, frustration,
rage at the enemy - yet such explanations do not justify
mass murder. Wade is guilty not only for his actions at
My Lai, but also for leading a deceitful and
self-defeating life afterwards. Still, I don't find him
evil by nature. He loves his wife dearly, he feels great
guilt, he wants to open up but cannot, until it's too
late. The man suffers. He's terrified of losing the woman
he loves.
Q: I know that you yourself were
present at My Lai some time after the massacre. What was
it like for you? Did it leave you, do you think, with any
intuition into what someone like John Wade - or William
Calley or Paul Meadlo - might have felt in the moments
before the killing started?
A: In some respects. Not just My Lai,
but Quang Ngai province and Vietnam in general. For
instance, there was a sense of never being able to find
the enemy because they were both among and of the
population. There was a sense of rage as you watched your
friends' bodies pile up. A sense of mystery, too, at
never knowing who was for you and who was against you. A
sense of growing indifference to the fate of the
Vietnamese themselves. All this was true for me, and it
was probably true for Calley. But it's just as true that
you don't go killing babies just because you're enraged
or frustrated. The events at My Lai are also a metaphor
for the evils that occur every day, for the sins that are
committed even in the course of living a life in the
suburbs and streets of America. Sin isn't limited to
warfare. We've all done bad things and had to find ways
to keep living.
Q: Why did you choose to make the
narrator a character in the novel? Who is he intended to
be? Is the reader meant to trust his interpretations? Is
he any more reliable than John himself?
A: He's more trustworthy. Imperfect,
though - limited by all that he does not and cannot know.
Like all of us. I saw the narrator as a biographer, a
medium, a storyteller like Conrad's Marlow. He's trying
to present an accurate flow of events, periodically
stepping back to make sense of what he's relating. Marlow
is fallible just as my own narrator is fallible. There's
always the problem of ignorance. There's always so much
we can never know about Kurtz. There's so much we can
never know about what happened at that cottage on Lake of
the Woods. There's always the wall of ignorance, beyond
which the narrator can only speculate. And that's the
heart of the novel. On the plot level, we will never know
what happened to Kathy. On the psychological level, we
can't read the hearts of other human beings. We can't
penetrate the minds of our own husbands and wives. We
can't read their motives or secret thoughts. We can only
guess. We can only hypothesize. Certain things in life
will always remain pure mystery, and this both frustrates
and fascinates us. In a footnote I use the example of the
way Lizzie Borden endures in American mythology. Custer's
Last Stand, the Kennedy assassination, the disappearance
of Amelia Earheart - we don't know what happened; we
can't know. If these mysteries were to be solved, we'd
stop caring. We don't go to movies about Herbert Hoover
dying of old age. We go to movies like JFK.
Human beings are entranced by mystery. Whole religions
are built around the condition of profound human
ignorance. What happens to us after we die? How did we
all get here? What caused the universe to exist?
Q: In your essay "The Magic
Show" you compare the act of making magic, of
conjuring up pleasurable illusions, to the art of writing
fiction. Yet John's use of magic seems less pleasant,
more sinister. Can you talk about this?
A: I tried to explore both sides of
this magic-doing business. For John Wade, magic was
partly a means of escape from an unhappy childhood, a way
of empowering himself, a means of earning applause and
respect and even love. But at the same time, he took all
this to an extreme, trying to control other human beings
through acts of deception and trickery. My psychological
read on Wade is that he is a guy who needed magic as a
way of manipulating an intolerable world, of seeking love
through deceitful means. His magic grew into something
pathological, a need to fool both himself and others in
order to endure his own guilt. I think many human beings
on this planet fall into exactly that trap. Politicians
among others. That's why I made Wade a politician. That
craving for power. That craving for love.
Q: Throughout the narrative, you
scatter clues that reinforce different hypotheses. For
example, John's memory of standing naked in the lake on
the night of Kathy's disappearance suggests that he may
in fact have killed her. Did you intend one of your
narrator's hypotheses to be "correct"? Or are
you rather obeying some literary counterpart of
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and presenting us with
a series of alternative truths, mutually exclusive and
equally valid?
A: I tried to make each hypothesis
plausible. John may have killed Kathy. Or Kathy may have
run off with someone else. Or maybe she simply drowned.
Or got lost in that vast wilderness. I believed in each
hypothesis as I wrote it. I inserted evidence to support
each hypothesis - just as life itself gives us
contradictory evidence about a great many things. But in
the end, it's all a mystery, insoluable, beyond
certainty. I mean, listen, if a mystery is solved, it's
no longer a mystery! Right? Many readers will probably
jump to the obvious and macabre conclusion: John was at
My Lai, therefore he murdered his wife. Yet, the search
of the cottage produces nothing incriminating. Both
Claude and Ruth believe in Wade's innocence. And even
Wade himself claims innocence toward the end of the
novel. Most novels adhere to a principle of certainty.
They show that this happened and then that happened. This
book is different. This book is about uncertainty. This
book adheres to the principle that much of what is
important in the world can never be known. That's what
disturbs people. In the Lake of the Woods suggests
that the "truth" of our lives is always
fragile, always elusive, always beyond the absolute.
Frustrating, sure. But that's our human predicament.
PRAISE
"A risky, ambitious, perceptive, engaging, and
troubling novel...a major attempt to come to grips with
the causes and consequences of the late 20th century's
unquenchable appetite for violence, both domestic and
foreign." - Chicago Tribune
"A relentless work full of white heat and dark
possibility." - The Boston Globe
"At bottom, this is a tale about the moral
effects of suppressing a true story, about the abuse of
history, about what happens to you when you pretend there
is no history." - The New York Times Book Review
"A memorable mystery story charged with haunting
ambiguity...If any American novelist is creating more
beautifully written, emotionally harrowing tales than Tim
O'Brien, I don't know who it could be." - Entertainment
Weekly
"An unrelenting exploration of the darkest
recesses of the human heart and psyche. O'Brien's
approach is bold, ambitious, and intriguing." - Houston
Chronicle
"This remarkable book is about the slipperiness
of truth, the weight of forgetting, and the way two
people disappear into themselves, and, ultimately, into
the Lake of the Woods." - The New Yorker
"O'Brien's clean, incantatory prose always hovers
on the edge of dream.... No one writes better about the
fear and homesickness of a boy adrift amid what he cannot
understand, be it combat or love." - Time
DISCUSSION
QUESTIONS
- Almost from this novel's first page we know that
Kathy Wade will vanish, and it is not long before
we discover that her disappearance will remain
unsolved. What, then, gives In the Lake of
the Woods its undeniable suspense? What does
it offer in place of the revelations of
traditional mysteries?
- Instead of a linear narrative, in which action
unfolds chronologically, Tim O'Brien has
constructed a narrative that simultaneously moves
forward and backward in time: forward from John
and Kathy's arrival at the cabin; backward into
John's childhood, and beyond that to Little Big
Horn and the War of Independence. It also moves
laterally, into the "virtual" time that
is represented by different hypotheses about
Kathy's fate. What does the author accomplish
with this narrative scheme? In what ways are his
different narrative strands connected?
- What does O'Brien accomplish in the sections
titled "Evidence"? What information do
these passages impart that is absent from the
straightforward narrative? How do they alter or
deepen our understanding of John as a magician, a
politician, a husband, and a soldier who
committed atrocities in wartime? What connections
do they forge between his private tragedy and the
pathologies of our public life and history? Does
the testimony of (or about) such "real"
people as Richard Nixon, William Calley, or
George Custer lend greater verisimilitude to
John's story or remind us that it--and John
himself--are artifices?
- Who is the narrator who addresses us in the
"Evidence" sections? Are we meant to
see him as a surrogate for the author, who also
served in Vietnam and revisited Thuan Yen many
years after the massacre? (See Tim O'Brien,
"The Vietnam in Me," in The New
York Times Magazine, October 3, 1994, pp.
48-57.) In what ways does O'Brien's use of this
narrator further explode the conventions of the
traditional novel?
- One of the few things that we know for certain
about John is that he loves Kathy. But what does
John mean by love? How do John's feelings for his
wife resemble his hopeless yearning for his
father, who had a similar habit of vanishing? In
what circumstances does John say "I love
you"? What vision of love is suggested by
his metaphor of two snakes devouring each other?
Why might Kathy have fallen in love with John?
- Although it is easy to see Kathy as the victim of
John's deceptions, the author at times suggests
that she may be more conscious (and therefore
more complex) than she first appears. We learn,
for example, that Kathy has always known about
John's spying and even referred to him as
"Inspector Clouseau," an ironic
counterpoint to John's vision of himself as
"Sorcerer." At a critical moment she
rebuffs her husband's attempt at a confession.
And in the final section of "Evidence,"
we get hints that Kathy may have planned her own
disappearance. Are we meant to see Kathy as
John's victim or as his accomplice, like a
beautiful assistant vanishing inside a magician's
cabinet?
- Why might John have entered politics? Is he
merely a cynical operator with no interest in
anything but winning? Or, as Tony Carbo suggests,
might John be trying to atone for his actions in
Vietnam? Why might the author have chosen to
leave John's political convictions a blank?
- John's response to the horrors of Thuan Yen is to
deny them: "This could not have happened.
Therefore it did not." Where else in the
novel does he perform this trick? How does John's
way of coping with the massacre compare to the
psychic strategies adopted by William Calley or
Paul Meadlo? Do any of O'Brien's characters seems
capable of acknowledging terrible truths
directly? How does In the Lake of the Woods treat
the matter of individual responsibility for evil?
- Each of this novel's hypotheses about events at
the cabin begins with speculation but gradually
comes to resemble certainty. The narrator
suggests that John and Kathy Wade are ultimately
unknowable, as well; that any attempt to
"penetrate...those leaden walls that encase
the human spirit" can never be anything but
provisional. Seen in this light, In the Lake
of the Woods comes to resemble a magician's
trick, in which every assertion turns out to be
only another speculation. Given the information
we receive, does any hypothesis about what
happened at Lake of the Woods seem more plausible
than the others? With what certainties, if any,
does this novel leave us?
RELATED
TITLES
The Things They Carried
What are the things men carry into war? And what is
the legacy they they return with? In the title story of
this critically acclaimed collection of stories of the
Vietnam war, O'Brien goes beyond the physical objects in
knapsacks and pockets to explore the emotional baggage of
men facing death. "I want you to feel what I
felt," he says. "I want you to know why
story-truth is truer sometimes than
happening-truth."
"In prose that combines the sharp, unsentimental
rhythms of Hemingway with gentler, more lyrical
descriptions, Mr. O'Brien gives the reader a shockingly
visceral sense of what it felt like to tramp through a
booby-trapped jungle. A vital, important book...." -
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
