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Introduction: Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods
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13658 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1995 |
381 Words |
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Twenty-five years after the war's end, Vietnam and the My Lai massacre, in particular, remain an unresolved rent in the country's psyche. Books and movies continue to appear in a steady stream, each claiming to have captured the true hell of war. Tim O'Brien, author of this month's featured novel, In the Lake of the Woods, has made a career of revisiting those bloody fields and broken lives, in fiction and nonfiction, to expose the truth and exorcise the demons that torture those who were there.
Although O'Brien never deliberately tries to deny the reality of what happened in Vietnam, he is not above letting memory and the imagination serve a higher moral purpose in attaining "truth." Believing reality or the "happening truth" too powerful to look at, he uses "story truth" in his novel Going after Cacciato, winner of the 1979 National Book Award, and short story collection The Things They Carried to help come to terms with the trauma of war.
Set in 1986 in the northern lake country of O'Brien's native Minnesota, In the Lake of the Woods, a love story wrapped in a mystery, is quite distinct from his previous works. An idealistic politician, John Wade, retreats with his wife, Kathy, to a lakeside cottage to recuperate from a humiliating election defeat. Wade had concealed his involvement in the My Lai massacre from his wife, campaign manager, the public--even himself--until the ugly truth about his past exploded during the campaign, shattering his life and the lives of those around him. O'Brien has said that Lake "is not about war but about secrecy and deceit and manipulation and the bad things we do for love."
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