Two of my family members recently passed away within a few months of each other. The loss burrowed into my fingertips; for a while pretty much every draft or story I began involved the recent death of a loved one or a missing person. A writing mentor suggested that I read In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien. I had one of those marathon-reading experiences where the book seemed to insist I put it on the top of my to-do list until I finished.
I’ve never read a book whose structure provided so much meaning. Usually characters win me over. But the form through which O’Brien delivers the narrative touched me deeply. The story of Kate Wade’s mysterious disappearance while vacationing in rural northern Minnesota with her husband John is told through a series of short, diverse chapters. Some are marked “Evidence,” and include lists of quotes from people who knew the couple, objects found in their childhood homes, clips of testimony, etc. Others are the narrator’s myriad hypotheses about what really happened to Kate. Still more are flashbacks detailing John’s horrific experiences in Vietnam and subsequent bouts with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The third-person narrator himself even enters into the text by way of footnotes, stating things like, “I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident. In any case, Kathy Wade is forever missing, and if you require solutions, you will have to look beyond these pages. Or read a different book.” What emerges are a host of competing narratives, each trying to supplant the other as the version of what happened. None succeed. The resistance of any dominant narrative is one of the most striking parts of this book. It isn’t so much that the narrator remains “objective,” it’s that he admits his own confusion and frustration at his inability to put together what really happened.
I remember being in the hospital with my mother and the doctor as we discussed at great length all of the things that could be going wrong with my grandfather’s failing body. We searched through his records to find what food group interacting with which medication led to the symptom that was possibly evidence of x, y, and/or z problem. We stood there in hospital room, talking over the machines beeps and hisses, comparing evidence while my grandfather lay there thinking whatever it is dying men think.
A few days after he passed, we were still obsessing over what went wrong medically, as if finding out what really happened to him might in some way make things better. Maybe it would have. At any rate, it was comforting to sort through something as seemingly solid as medicine when so many bigger questions loomed.
Slowly, not of my own doing, I began to make peace with the mystery of what had happened, and began to move into even more emotionally difficult territory, populated by that looming question that seemed to drive all of the others: who was my grandfather? At his funeral, we shared stories, gathered pictures and press clippings, talked to old friends–only this time the evidence was gathered in hope of discovering the true identity of that person who had left us. Instead of focusing on how or why it had happened, our narratives now competed to answer that even more daunting question of who.
Which is why I so appreciate how In the Lake of the Woods refuses to answer the questions “where-is-she” and “who-done-it” for the sake of the larger questions that slowly begin driving the book: “Who is John Wade?” and “Who is Kathy Wade?”
Once I finished, I gave the novel to my dad to read. He emailed me a couple of days later with a quick note: It is terrific – halfway finished. I went over to visit him a week or so later and the first thing he asked me was “So who did it?!” We laughed. It was funny because O’Brien had written a novel of such depth and richness we no longer cared about the answer.
