In the Lake of the Woods

Author: Tim O'Brien

Rating: ⭐ 5/5

Date Read: 2013/10/25

Pages: 303

“The secrets would remain secret - the things he’d seen, the things he’d done. He would repair what he could, he would endure, he would go from year to year without letting on that there were tricks.” - Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.” - Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

In the Lake of the Woods is a mystery without a resolution. That’s not a spoiler: O’Brien makes this aspect of the book clear from the beginning. There are the references to magic tricks, to things no one knows. Kathy Wade vanished, and it’s up to the audience to figure out the trick.

That sounds frustratingly post-modern, but it isn’t. In the Lake of the Woods is a tightly constructed thriller. It’s deeply disturbing, but also strangely satisfying. It feels as if there’s a climax, a denouement, but I’d be hard pressed to tell you what they were. Instead, I’ll try to figure out how O’Brien pulled these sleight of hand tricks over on a scrupulous reader such as myself. The magician, of course, never tells.