Q: How did you come to write In the Lake of the Woods? Did you know the whole story from the beginning, or did you start with a particular premise or image?
A: I certainly did not know the whole story. It would've killed my own interest and curiosity--like going to a movie after someone has given away its conclusion. I began In the Lake of the Woods with the scene on the porch. An image of two very unhappy people, lost in the fog, lost in a deep spiritual and psychological way. As a writer, I had to discover bit by bit the causes of their immense despair, just as the reader does. Discovery is one of the great joys for both the reader and the writer.
Q: One of the problems this novel poses is that the reader is asked to like--or at least empathize with--a character who is, at the very least, severely damaged, addicted to subterfuge and guilty of terrible acts during the Vietnam War. Was this something that worried you as you wrote? How did you compensate for it?
A: It didn't worry me. One of the things I've never understood is the complaint that such-and-such a character is "unlikable." The figures in fiction I respond to most powerfully are those I don't necessarily like or even identify with: Raskolnikov, or Abraham, or Bartleby, or Captain Ahab, or Anna Karenina, or Emma Bovary, or Lady Macbeth, or Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, another man damaged by a war. Who wants to go out for a beer with Lady Macbeth? Yet when I read about such characters, I'm pulled along by their spiritual and moral problems; I'm often rooting for them to emerge whole from the blackness. Wade is one of those characters. I find myself rooting for him, wishing him the best, even as his life gets bleaker and bleaker, as he keeps making bad choices. But then, sometimes people don't have absolute freedom of choice. Life and history impose constraints on all of us. In Wade's case--a childhood like his, a history like his--the freedom to choose has been limited by an overwhelming need to be loved, at almost any cost. So I have sympathy for him. He's a man in great trouble. There's a piece of John Wade inside each of us, I think. We don't have to like it, but we would be wise to acknowledge it.
Q: Speaking of guilt, is John Wade responsible for what happened at Thuan Yen? Are the terrible things that happened to him in combat--and earlier during his childhood - meant to justify or even explain his conduct? Do you believe that William Calley had a story of his own that might mitigate his guilt? Is something like the My Lai massacre fully explicable in terms of individual pathology?
A: We're all responsible for our actions in the world, and John Wade is responsible for his. Unfortunately, he can't own up to his sins and failures and weaknesses. He not only hides them from others but from himself, as so many of us do. Even as Wade tries to atone for his past by entering politics as a progressive Democrat, he's drawing a veil over his own misdeeds and so is both perpetuating and compounding all his guilt. There's a difference between explanation and exculpation. One can point to all sorts of reasons why people like Calley did what they did: fear, frustration, rage at the enemy - yet such explanations do not justify mass murder. Wade is guilty not only for his actions at My Lai, but also for leading a deceitful and self-defeating life afterwards. Still, I don't find him evil by nature. He loves his wife dearly, he feels great guilt, he wants to open up but cannot, until it's too late. The man suffers. He's terrified of losing the woman he loves.
Q: I know that you yourself were present at My Lai some time after the massacre. What was it like for you? Did it leave you, do you think, with any intuition into what someone like John Wade - or William Calley or Paul Meadlo - might have felt in the moments before the killing started?
A: In some respects. Not just My Lai, but Quang Ngai province and Vietnam in general. For instance, there was a sense of never being able to find the enemy because they were both among and of the population. There was a sense of rage as you watched your friends' bodies pile up. A sense of mystery, too, at never knowing who was for you and who was against you. A sense of growing indifference to the fate of the Vietnamese themselves. All this was true for me, and it was probably true for Calley. But it's just as true that you don't go killing babies just because you're enraged or frustrated. The events at My Lai are also a metaphor for the evils that occur every day, for the sins that are committed even in the course of living a life in the suburbs and streets of America. Sin isn't limited to warfare. We've all done bad things and had to find ways to keep living.
Q: Why did you choose to make the narrator a character in the novel? Who is he intended to be? Is the reader meant to trust his interpretations? Is he any more reliable than John himself?
A: He's more trustworthy. Imperfect, though - limited by all that he does not and cannot know. Like all of us. I saw the narrator as a biographer, a medium, a storyteller like Conrad's Marlow. He's trying to present an accurate flow of events, periodically stepping back to make sense of what he's relating. Marlow is fallible just as my own narrator is fallible. There's always the problem of ignorance. There's always so much we can never know about Kurtz. There's so much we can never know about what happened at that cottage on Lake of the Woods. There's always the wall of ignorance, beyond which the narrator can only speculate. And that's the heart of the novel. On the plot level, we will never know what happened to Kathy. On the psychological level, we can't read the hearts of other human beings. We can't penetrate the minds of our own husbands and wives. We can't read their motives or secret thoughts. We can only guess. We can only hypothesize. Certain things in life will always remain pure mystery, and this both frustrates and fascinates us. In a footnote I use the example of the way Lizzie Borden endures in American mythology. Custer's Last Stand, the Kennedy assassination, the disappearance of Amelia Earheart - we don't know what happened; we can't know. If these mysteries were to be solved, we'd stop caring. We don't go to movies about Herbert Hoover dying of old age. We go to movies like JFK. Human beings are entranced by mystery. Whole religions are built around the condition of profound human ignorance. What happens to us after we die? How did we all get here? What caused the universe to exist?
Q: In your essay "The Magic Show" you compare the act of making magic, of conjuring up pleasurable illusions, to the art of writing fiction. Yet John's use of magic seems less pleasant, more sinister. Can you talk about this?
A: I tried to explore both sides of this magic-doing business. For John Wade, magic was partly a means of escape from an unhappy childhood, a way of empowering himself, a means of earning applause and respect and even love. But at the same time, he took all this to an extreme, trying to control other human beings through acts of deception and trickery. My psychological read on Wade is that he is a guy who needed magic as a way of manipulating an intolerable world, of seeking love through deceitful means. His magic grew into something pathological, a need to fool both himself and others in order to endure his own guilt. I think many human beings on this planet fall into exactly that trap. Politicians among others. That's why I made Wade a politician. That craving for power. That craving for love.
Q: Throughout the narrative, you scatter clues that reinforce different hypotheses. For example, John's memory of standing naked in the lake on the night of Kathy's disappearance suggests that he may in fact have killed her. Did you intend one of your narrator's hypotheses to be "correct"? Or are you rather obeying some literary counterpart of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and presenting us with a series of alternative truths, mutually exclusive and equally valid?
A: I tried to make each hypothesis plausible. John may have killed Kathy. Or Kathy may have run off with someone else. Or maybe she simply drowned. Or got lost in that vast wilderness. I believed in each hypothesis as I wrote it. I inserted evidence to support each hypothesis - just as life itself gives us contradictory evidence about a great many things. But in the end, it's all a mystery, insoluable, beyond certainty. I mean, listen, if a mystery is solved, it's no longer a mystery! Right? Many readers will probably jump to the obvious and macabre conclusion: John was at My Lai, therefore he murdered his wife. Yet, the search of the cottage produces nothing incriminating. Both Claude and Ruth believe in Wade's innocence. And even Wade himself claims innocence toward the end of the novel. Most novels adhere to a principle of certainty. They show that this happened and then that happened. This book is different. This book is about uncertainty. This book adheres to the principle that much of what is important in the world can never be known. That's what disturbs people. In the Lake of the Woods suggests that the "truth" of our lives is always fragile, always elusive, always beyond the absolute. Frustrating, sure. But that's our human predicament.
Excerpted from In the Lake of the Woods © Copyright 2008 by Tim O'Brien. Reprinted with permission by Penguin USA. All rights reserved.
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