MADreads

Is war ever over?

November 26th, 2007 Katie H.

What happens when a war is over?  Does it ever really leave those touched by it?

For John Wade, Vietnam was an experience that he had done everything to make disappear, hiding the truth from everyone, including his wife.  But when the truth about his involvement in a wartime atrocity surfaces in the closing weeks of his Senate campaign, Wade finds that he can’t escape his history.  After his defeat, Wade and his wife Kathy retreat to the wilderness surrounding Lake of the Woods in far northern Minnesota.  There, Kathy disappears.  Her disappearance raises the possibilities of suicide, murder or an attempt to begin a new life.  

Author Tim O’Brien explores all the possibilities in his 1994 novel In the Lake of the Woods.  Best known for his Pulitzer Prize-nominated collection of short stories The Things They Carried, O’Brien has long drawn on his own experiences as an infantryman in the jungles of Vietnam, lending an intense immediacy to his fiction.  In depicting the Wades’ marriage, O’Brien mixes flashbacks to Vietnam and the Wades’ early life with possible explanations for Kathy’s disappearance, portraying a marriage already vulnerable to betrayal. 

Told in the stark, beautiful language that marks O’Brien’s other stories, In the Lake of the Woods resists the sort of definite answers that history usually demands.  Like Vietnam with the main characters, it’s an ending that will linger with readers.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction