In the Lake of the Woods

Book by Tim O’Brien

Annotation by W. Ross Feeler

 

The angle makes the dream.

—Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods (286)

Experimental writing—and more specifically, experimental points of view—in fiction are often denigrated as interfering with what Coleridge calls the “willing suspension of disbelief.” Elsewhere, John Gardner talks about fiction as a ”vivid and continuous dream.” Deviations from the literary norms wake the reader up, break that sense of disbelief. Or so the story goes.

Tim O’Brien, however, subverts conventional wisdom concerning POV in same way he subverts conventional wisdom concerning Vietnam. This is in full display in his 1994 novel In the Lake of the Woods, in which chapters are told from a variety of angles.

One set of chapters is told from a close-third, present-day perspective of John Wade, the focal character in the novel. This is traditional, what we’ve come to expect from American authors.

Contrastingly, another set, labeled Evidence, is comprised of an array from quotations—from historical figures, literary works, fictional characters from the novel, psychological studies, and various books on magic. While this might initially seem disorienting, the expertly juxtaposed quotations solidify, rather than undercut, the reader’s suspension of disbelief. By allowing fictional characters to speak alongside historical figures, the narrative is endowed with a sense of historical legitimacy one rarely encounters in literary fiction.

This legitimacy also comes, in part, from the footnotes in the Evidence chapters. Rather than destabilizing the narrative, as footnotes are wont to do in many postmodern novels, the footnotes in Woods give the reader a sense of groundedness. This is because the footnotes, rather than being presented as coming from an outside, objective observer are presented as coming from the author himself—Tim O’Brien. This is similar to the way that O’Brien’s persona shows up in The Things They Carried; similar, but not the same. In Things, the persona of the author is a more active character in the story. In Woods, the persona of the author is more concerned with the compilation of evidence and the conclusions one can come to based on that evidence.

This allows O’Brien to take even more POV risks in the novel, such as the inclusion of a set of chapters labeled “Hypothesis.” These chapters are guesses: the persona of the author is trying to imagine what might have happened to Kathy Wade, John’s wife, who disappears early in the novel. This, too, has the feeling of history—it reminded me, for instance, of Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, which is essentially a guessed-at biography of Shakespeare based on the evidence. The difference in Woods is that the author is coming up with guesses that seem contrary to the evidence, which seems to incriminate John Wade in his wife’s murder. The alternative reality becomes as important—perhaps more important—than reality as such.

The novel also moves centripetally, circling its subjects from varying distances to give the reader different vistas. When, near the end of the book, we hit the center, we find that the center is not what we expected: there is no great reveal that ties up the issue of the murder. Instead of discovering the answer to the mystery, we find an ever-expanding mystery—because In the Lake of the Woods is not a whodunit, though it uses elements of that genre. It is about the mystery of human nature, love and evil co-existing at close quarters. And that sort of mystery is insoluble.

O’Brien’s gutsy POV shifts have inspired me to take more risks in my own work. This doesn’t mean, of course, I’ve inserted chapters labeled Evidence into my novel labeled. This would be theft, not experimentation. Rather, I’ve been bolstered to do creative things on my own. In one of my recent short stories, the first section is told from the traditional, close-third, the second from the second-person POV, and the third from a roving semi-authorial POV. This isn’t incredibly groundbreaking, as all of these POVs have long histories in literature, except that these sorts of shifts rarely pop up in short stories. Additionally, I include an embedded essay written for  a freshman English class (one of the protagonists is a teacher).

POV experimentation is not dead, and it’s not something that works within the strict confines of the ivory tower. Woods was a national bestseller. In this case, the evidence speaks for itself: experimentation and accessibility don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Freedom

Book by Jonathan Franzen

Annotation by Kate Maruyama

The good thing about writing an annotation is that you can put aside the noise of whether a book is well-reviewed or not and whatever controversy is surrounding it and just get down to the nuts and bolts of craft. Although I must note that I was surprised that their was so much controversy about this book (outside of the Weiner/Franzen personality clash); it was neither a work of genius nor all that terrible. I suppose it’s proof that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Jonathan Franzen did some interesting stuff in Freedom and, conversely, could have used a machete to cut out other stuff. But there you go.

The book is an in-depth look at various involved characters’ progress from different points of view. I always find it interesting when these points of view bounce off of each other, or provide us with new insight when we’ve established our ideas from reading one point of view. Franzen does this well by opening the book summarizing the life of the Berglund family from the opinionated and breathless point of view of their neighbor. This gives the reader a broad overview of what’s going to happen, so that when we dip in and out of other characters’ points of view, we recognize where we are in the story. It is a clever device to keep in mind.

We then are given Patty Berglund’s point of view in a journal that she keeps for her therapist: in third person.  We are introduced to the love triangle of Patty, her husband Walter and his roommate/best friend rocker Richard Katz. This triangle is told to us in layers from each of its three points of view, giving us new insight into it as each person’s story unfolds. It is a clever investigation of how differently people are wired and how three people can all look at one affair from his/her own self-informed completely skewed perspective.

Each of these characters’ voices is engaging and absorbing. The book, despite its five hundred plus page length keeps a pace going for a good several hundred pages. It’s a solid example of how keeping each voice close and real can keep the reader aligned with even the most unappealing characters. Franzen’s characters are so real and so detailed that you do feel as if you’re on a long car trip with people you just met and don’t necessarily like. Franzen has a problem with women I just can’t put my finger on. It’s like listening to a serial killer talk about a cocktail party–something is essentially missing. I reached the end of the novel assured I wouldn’t want to hang out with any of these people again, but I reached the end of the novel and that’s something.

Franzen manages to create tension around certain incidents in these people’s lives. We know that Patty is going to marry Walter and their courtship is so clumsy and simply wrong-headed in places that the tension of “how the hell do these two end up together?” keeps us through the rocky ups and downs of their relationship.  We know that Richard has an enormous impact on their lives, so his self-absorbed meanderings are fascinating as he careens dangerously in and out of their lives. He’s a rock star celebrity who is vacuous and doesn’t think about life as a whole, but as a series of bad choices that weren’t his fault. Again, the voice, albeit close, third, is strong and Richard’s day to day decisions from not sleeping with his best friend’s girlfriend to sleeping with his best friend’s wife, from fixing roofs to trying to sleep with high school aged girls are mesmerizing. Franzen refers to Richard by his first name in any other character’s perspective on him, but when we are in Richard’s point of view, the character is referred to by his last name, Katz. This was an interesting way of not only differentiating points of view, but of distancing Richard from his own emotions, demonstrating his lack of contact with his own life. A clever tool I hope to steal at some point.

The writing itself did not dazzle, the way such front-runners in lists and contests do. There was no sentence-to-sentence exquisiteness going on, but Franzen’s powers of observation are keen and there is beauty in a few of his smaller moments of human observation, “She smelled like cigarettes, and she had a heartrending way of eating her slice of chocolate-mousse cake, parceling out each small bite for intensive savoring, as if it were the best thing that was going to happen to her that day.” (278)

Unfortunately Franzen has a political axe to grind. When Walter gets involved in mountaintop removal and population control, Franzen gets bogged down in the details and we are left with page up on page of proselytizing at the hands of Walter and his supposedly alluring assistant, Lalitha. It was difficult to feel attracted or sympathetic to Lalitha, as she comes off as a politicized talking head, thus making a dramatic turn later (not wishing to spoil that turn I’ll leave it there) lack resonance. The idea of removing a mountaintop to save a bird and that coal is better than petroleum is interesting for a one page article, but begins to grate when put in exhausting detail in the middle of what had felt like a very human drama. Franzen could have pruned down this point of view to maybe two pages in Walter’s life and remained reliant upon the character’s actions and poor choices, which were the motivating factors of the book. On top of this, he gives us Joey, the self-absorbed college-age son of Walter and his bum deal selling faulty truck parts to the American army in Iraq. Franzen squishes documentary and commentary into a story that had been doing just fine being told by characters. There is this urgent push to make the book something BIGGER than a close up long-term portrait of a family. It is there that he lost me. About the time Walter and Lalitha are trying to sell Richard on their warbler scheme, the book became a slog for its last two hundred pages.

But the story overall, the fact that family is not always what we hope it to be at the beginning that the very definition of a family may change several times in its lifetime–this is a useful aspect of human beings worth pursuing. As I move forward with my novel, which takes place over a span of time and through a few mutations of a single family, I am heartened that such a large story can be contained between two covers without becoming epic. And given an editor brave enough to face up to Mr. Franzen, this book may have become something worth all of the fuss. But my opinion doesn’t matter here, just the look at craft.

A Mercy

book by Toni Morrison

annotation by Aaron Gansky

This was my first Morrison book. I was eagerly anticipating it, as I’ve heard many good things about her work. But I found it very different. I’m not sure exactly what I expected—maybe it’s exactly what I got. It took me a long time to figure out who was who. The shifts in POV, while they provided depth to the characters, seemed so different that I found it hard to follow. For example, many were in first person, some weren’t. Often, in the first person POVs, she would write “you,” as if the narrator was speaking to someone in particular, like it was a letter. This seemed to distract me, because I was trying to figure out who the narrator was AND who they were speaking to. A challenge, to say the least. For whatever reason, it didn’t really become clear to me until the end. I wonder if she did this purposely, so as to create mystery, but I never felt like I knew enough to know mystery. I was just confused.

On the positive side, the characters are definitely well developed, very round. Still, I found it hard to tell them apart at times. I think the dialect was another obstacle for me to overcome. I kept thinking I was simply missing something great—like the rest of the world could read this and would love it, and call it genius. But I struggled just to figure out who was on first.

Perhaps what I take away from this book is simply the idea that when I work with multiple POVs, I should make sure it is clear who is speaking, and WHEN they are speaking. Jumping POVs is one thing, but jumping POVs and time is REALLY hard to follow.