In the Lake of the Woods
A remarkable novel from the National Book Award-winning author of ‘Going After Cacciato’ and ‘The Things They Carried’, which combines the power of the finest Vietnam fiction with the tension of a many-layered mystery.In a remote lakeside cabin deep in the Minnesota forests, Kathy Wade is comforting her husband John, an ambitious politician, after a devastating electoral defeat.Then one night she vanishes, and gradually the search for Kathy becomes a voyage into the darkest corners of John Wade’s life, a life of deception and deceit – the life of a man able to escape everything but the chains of his darkest secret.
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TIM O’BRIEN
In the Lake of the Woods
HarperPress An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 1995
First published in the USA by
Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence 1994
Copyright © Tim O’Brien 1994
The Author asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of this work
Portions of this book have appeared, in substantially different form,
in The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Magazine and Esquire
The author is grateful for permission to quote from the following:
‘Shame’ by Robert Karen, Copyright © 1992 by Robert Karen, as first published in The Atlantic Monthly, February 1992; ‘Homeless My Lai Vet Killed in Booze Fight,’ from the Boston Herald, September 14, 1988, reprinted with permission of the Boston Herald.
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006543954
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN 9780007381753 Version: 2015-07-03
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FOR KATE
Although this book contains material from the world in which we live, including references to actual places, people, and events, it must be read as a work of fiction. All dialogue is invented. Certain notorious and very real incidents have been altered or reimagined. John and Kathy Wade are creations of the author’s imagination, as are all of the characters who populate the state of Minnesota and the town of Angle Inlet in this novel.
Contents
In September, after the primary, they rented an old yellow cottage in the timber at the edge of Lake of the Woods. There were many trees, mostly pine and birch, and there was the dock and the boathouse and the narrow dirt road that came through the forest and ended in polished gray rocks at the shore below the cottage. Then there were no roads at all. There were no towns and no people. Beyond the dock the big lake opened northward into Canada, where the water was everything, vast and very cold, and where there were secret channels and portages and bays and tangled forests and islands without names. Everywhere, for many thousand square miles, the wilderness was all one thing, like a great curving mirror, infinitely blue and beautiful, always the same. Which was what they had come for. They needed the solitude. They needed the repetition, the dense hypnotic drone of woods and water, but above all they needed to be together.
At night they would spread their blankets on the porch and lie watching the fog move toward them from across the lake. They were not yet prepared to make love. They had tried once, but it had not gone well, so now they would hold each other and talk quietly about having babies and perhaps a house of their own. They pretended things were not so bad. The election had been lost, but they tried to believe it was not the absolute and crushing thing it truly was. They were careful with each other; they did not talk about the sadness or the sudden trapdoor feeling in their stomachs. Lying still under their blankets, they would take turns thinking up names for the children they wanted—funny names, sometimes, so they could laugh—and then later they would plan the furnishings for their new house, the fine rugs they would buy, the antique brass lamps, the exact colors of the wallpaper, all the details, how they would be sure to have a giant sun porch and a stone fireplace and a library with tall walnut bookcases and a sliding ladder.
In the darkness it did not matter that these things were expensive and impossible. It was a terrible time in their lives and they wanted desperately to be happy. They wanted happiness without knowing what it was, or where to look, which made them want it all the more.
