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Through a Mirror Darkly |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / FEATURED BOOK: Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods |
| Author: Thomas Deignan |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 5/1/1995 |
| Size: 2,046 Words, 12,531 Characters |
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To a degree, it is Tim O'Brien's fault that the Vietnam War is primarily a conflict artistically associated with film and not fiction. A slew of movies, from Apocalypse Now to the Rambo shoot-'em-ups to the recent The Walking Dead, have served to establish a durable, highly scrutinized Vietnam genre. Still, no single film leaps above the rest. (Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket probably comes closest.) On the other hand, O'Brien's 1978 novel Going after Cacciato, which won the National Book Award and yielded numerous comparisons to Joseph Heller, is so widely recognized as the standard on the war that subsequent Vietnam novels--and several impressive ones have since been written, by O'Brien and others--never fully emerge from Cacciato's imposing shadow.
Still, O'Brien continues to chart the landscape of the Vietnam War. As he did in his dynamic collection of stories The Things They Carried, O'Brien blends Vietnam's past and present in his latest novel, In the Lake of the Woods, conveying the war's effects through the turmoil of an angst-ridden protagonist, a vet turned husband and politician, named John Wade.
Although some of the book's premises seem uninspired, In the Lake of the Woods certainly deserves a place among O'Brie...
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...al and naked power. He creates visual images that can simmer with quiet possibility or yank at the pit of our stomach. O'Brien says he's leaving the writing game for a while. He deserves it. Maybe he's taking his own advice, as voiced by the narrator of In the Lake of the Woods: "Evidence is not truth. It is only evident ... if you require solutions, you will have to look beyond these pages."
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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