In the Lake of the Woods

“Late at night an electric sizzle came into his blood, a tight pumped-up killing rage, and he couldn’t keep it in and he couldn’t let it out. He wanted to hurt things. Grab a knife and start slashing and never stop. All those years. Climbing like a son of a bitch, clawing his way up inch by fucking inch, and then it all came crashing down at once” 

John’s furious response to every incident of perceived humiliation lies at the core of his personality. Clearly unstable, John attempts to hide this part of himself from everyone, particularly his wife, Kathy. This rage is one of the secrets he keeps. He simply cannot cope with the rejection and defeat he has experienced.

“On one occasion, as she was washing breakfast dishes, Kathy made a low sound in her throat and began to say something, just a word or two, then her eyes focused elsewhere, beyond him, beyond the walls of the cottage, and then after a time she looked down at the dishwater and did not look back again. It was an image that would not go away. Twenty-four hours later, when she was gone, John Wade would remember the enormous distance that had come into her face at that instant, a kind of travel, and he would find himself wondering where she had taken herself, and why, and by what means” 

John Wade is reconstructing his last day with his wife, after Kathy has disappeared. This moment exemplifies the ways in which the author plants clues about what might have happened. Not a single thing in their relationship is what it appears to be. Kathy might have been planning to leave John; she might have been thinking about talking to him about what she was really feeling. Neither John nor the reader will ever know for sure. In such passages, the author suggests that no one can ever know another person’s thoughts or motivations. We are all mysteries to one another.

“‘You know, I think politics and magic were almost the same thing for him. Transformations—that’s part of it—trying to change things. When you think about it, magicians and politicians are basically control freaks. [Laughter] I should know, right?’” 

Tony Carbo, John’s campaign manager, offers insight into John’s character. Magic and politics were the same for John—both offer ways to make people admire and love him, while he alone knows that he is manipulating the system; only he knows how the trick works.

“John Wade was a magician; he did not give away many tricks. Moreover, there are certain mysteries that weave through life itself, human motive and human desire. Even much of what might appear to be fact in the narrative—action, word, though—must ultimately be viewed as a diligent but still imaginative reconstruction of events. I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident” 

The narrator reveals a central truth of this novel: knowing all the facts does not guarantee that the mystery will be solved. The narrator also reveals John Wade’s real power as a magician, a trickster; this is the lens through which all of John’s actions, words, and deeds must be viewed.

“In any case, Kathy Wade is forever missing, and if you require solutions, you will have to look beyond these pages. Or read a different book” 

The narrator indicates that his study of the mysterious disappearance of Kathy Wade does not have to do with finding out the truth about what happened to her. Instead, he suggests that this book has other things to offer. As the book unfolds, those other offerings—a study of madness, war, and love—become clear. The purpose of this novel isn’t the resolution of a mystery, but what is revealed simply by trying to understand it. The narrator acknowledges here that many readers may be uncomfortable with a book that does not offer concrete solutions.

“She returned his gaze without backing off. She was hard to fool. Again, briefly, he was assailed by the sudden fear of losing her, of bungling things, and for a long while he tried to explain how wrong she was … Yet even as he spoke, John realized he was not telling the full truth. Politics was manipulation. Like a magic show: invisible wires and secret trapdoors. He imagined placing a city in the palm of his hand, making his hand into a fist, making the city in to a happier place. Manipulation, that was the fun of it” 

While they are still in college, Kathy sees some of the flaws in John’s grandiose, self-serving vision of his future, and John cannot help but see the truth in her observations. Yet the overwhelming thrill brought about by manipulating the system, arranging things to his satisfaction without anyone knowing that he’s done it, is just too strong for him to resist. Here, John Wade reveals that he is a dangerous man.

“‘I’m the company witch doctor,’ he wrote Kathy. ‘These guys listen to me. The actually believe in this crap.’ … Kathy did not write back for several weeks. And then she sent only a postcard: ‘A piece of advice. Be careful with the tricks. One of these days you’ll make me disappear’” 

This correspondence takes place while John is in Vietnam and reveals several important points: first, John enjoys the power of his mysterious alter-ego, Sorcerer; second, Kathy knows John better than he wants her to, and she is clearly threatening to leave him if he goes too far. Her postcard also eerily foreshadows her disappearance in the Lake of the Woods, perhaps another clue that John Wade is responsible, one way or another, for making his wife disappear.

“In a dim way, only half admitted, John understood that the alternative was simply to love her, and to go on loving her, yet somehow the ambiguity seemed intolerable. Nothing could ever be sure, not if he spied forever, because there was always the threat of tomorrow’s treachery, or next year’s treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that. . . .Besides, he liked spying. He was Sorcerer. He had the gift, the knack” 

Finding that he cannot trust Kathy, John decides to spy on her upon his return from Vietnam. This quotation reveals the struggle within John Wade: he wants to love and to trust, but he never can resist the pull of discovering other people’s secrets while maintaining his own. He has trapped himself in a cycle where he can never trust, and he must continue to spy because, even if Kathy is faithful and trustworthy today, she might not be tomorrow. Besides, he needs to know Kathy’s secrets because he is hiding some terrible secrets himself. In a way, his spying brings her down to his level, in his own mind.

“Sorcerer laughed and carried her inside … The trick then was to be vigilant, he would guard his advantage. The secrets would remain secret—the things he’s see, then things he’d done. He would repair what he could, he would endure, he would go from year to year without letting on that here were tricks” 

Here John Wade reveals his survival technique. John’s psychological break and consequent survival mechanism—his alter-ego, Sorcerer—follows him into his life after the war. Whenever John is threatened or stressed, or experiencing a powerful emotion, even love, Sorcerer takes over. As a result, it is Sorcerer who marries Kathy, rather than John. Not only does John accept Sorcerer, he welcomes him and trusts him to protect John Wade’s secrets. John doesn’t see Sorcerer as a delusion, but as a survival mechanism that will help him keep his marriage to Kathy and the life he wants. What helped him survive the war in Vietnam continues to help him now.

“In the dark he heard something twitch and flutter, like wings, and then a low, savage buzzing sound….Again, for an indeterminate time, the night seemed to dissolve all around him, and he was somewhere outside himself, awash in despair, watching the mirrors in his head flicker with radical implausibilities. The teakettle and a wooden hoe and a vanishing village and PFC Weatherby and hot white steam. . . .

He would remember smoothing back her hair.

He would remember pulling a blanket to her chin and then returning to the living room, where for a long while he lost track of his whereabouts. All around him was that furious buzzing noise. The unities of time and space had unraveled”

The night Kathy disappears, John experiences a psychotic breakdown. He does not remember what happened, and he can never reveal to anyone what happened to him that night. He does not know himself what he did or did not do, other than killing all of the plants in the house by pouring boiling water on them. However, that does not mean that he did the same to his wife. This passage does reveal the true depth of his mental illness. He has desperately tried to cope on his own, and clearly his coping mechanisms have broken down.

“At times, too, John imagined loving himself. And never risking the loss of love. And winning forever the love of some secret invisible audience—the people he might meet someday, the people he had already met. Sometimes he did bad things just to be loved, and sometimes he hated himself for needing love so badly”

John Wade identifies his primary motivation: the need to be loved. It drives him to spy on Kathy, and to allow his secret alter-ego—Sorcerer—help him to maintain the façade of a confident, whole man. No one, not even Kathy, knows the true depth of his voracious need for love and what he might do to protect it.

“He compared their love to a pair of snakes he’d seen along a trail near Pinkville, each snake eating the other’s tail, a bizarre circle of appetites that brought the heads closer and closer until one of the men in Charlie Company used a machete to end it. ‘That’s how our love feels,’ John wrote, ‘like we’re swallowing each other up, except in a good way, a perfect number One Yum-Yum way, and I can’t wait to get home and see what would’ve happened if those two dumbass snakes finally ate each other’s heads’” 

This bizarre image, of two snakes eating each other, exemplifies John’s obsessive love for Kathy. On the one hand, he means to show how much he desires her, but underlying that desire is a more sinister belief: that love means obliteration. This passage lends support to the theory that John killed Kathy to stop her leaving him.

“‘[O]ne plus one equals zero!’” 

John repeatedly uses the image of the two snakes to describe his love for Kathy.  In his mind, the two snakes don’t become one, they become zero. While a circle or a zero shape can represent unity or wholeness, zero also implies that they disappear. This image foreshadows the result of their love; in the end, they both disappear.

“The mirror made this possible, and so John would sometimes carry it to school with him, or to baseball games, or to bed at night. Which was another trick: how he secretly kept the old stand-up mirror in his head. Pretending, of course—he understood that—but he felt calm and safe with the big mirror behind his eyes, where he could slide away behind the glass, where he could turn bad things into good things and just be happy” 

John Wade describes the origins of his ability to manipulate reality and escape into his own world. John Wade was already damaged when he arrived in Vietnam. The later creation of his alter-ego, Sorcerer, simply gave a name to a technique that John had been using for years, in which he escaped into his imagination and Sorcerer acted for him in the world. Kathy Wade never hears any of this; nobody does. John keeps this secret to the end of the novel.

“There were times when John Wade wanted to open up Kathy’s belly and crawl inside and stay there forever. He wanted to swim through her blood and climb up and down her spine and drink from her ovaries and press his gums against the firm red muscle of her heart. He wanted to suture their lives together”

John believes that such desires demonstrate his love for Kathy; the reader may disagree. O’Brien deliberately delineates the full range of John’s madness and his obsessive desire to possess all of Kathy Wade. This particular passage is all the more disturbing, perhaps, because this image is not coming from a John hiding behind the mirrors of his mind. This is the “real” John Wade.

“What drives me on, I realize, is a craving to force entry into another heart, to trick the tumblers of natural law, to perform miracles of knowing. It’s human nature. We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible”

The narrator identifies a significant theme of the novel—the impossibility of truly knowing another human being. Just as John Wade yearns to know his wife and spies on her to get closer to her, the narrator reveals that he wants to know John Wade in a similar way. The narrator and Wade share the desire to know the unknowable; they seek to know and understand at least one other person’s innermost being. John sought that intimacy with Kathy; the narrator seeks it with John. Both are acknowledged voyeurs and seekers, if not of truth, at least of knowledge.

“(‘I love you,’ someone says, and instantly we being to wonder—‘well, how much?’—and when the answer comes—‘With my whole heart’—we then wonder about the wholeness of a fickle heart.) Our lovers, our husbands, our wives, our fathers, our gods—they are all beyond us” 

This narrator here reiterates the novel’s central tenet: that all love is impossibly tainted by the fecklessness and frailties of the human heart.

“Behind him and in front of him, a brisk machine-gun wind pressed through Thuan Yen … He found someone stabbing people with a big silver knife. Hutto was shooting corpses. T’Souvas was shooting children. Doherty and Terry were finishing off the wounded. This was not madness, Sorcerer understood. This was sin. He felt it winding through his own arteries, something vile, and slippery like heavy black oil in a crankcase.

Stop, he thought. But it wouldn’t stop. Someone shot an old famer and lifted him up and dumped him in a well and tossed in a grenade.

Roshevitz shot people in the head.

Hutson and Wright took turns on a machine gun.

The killing was steady and inclusive. The men took frequent smoke breaks; they ate candy bars and exchanged stories” 

John Wade describes on the massacre that took place on March 16, 1968 in Thuan Yen. The narrator uses simple, direct language to allow the scene to speak for itself. He depicts what war atrocities look, smell, and feel like, and the effect they have on everyone involved. 

“They never talked about it. Not directly, not obliquely. On those occasions when it rose up in their minds, or when they felt its presence between them, they would carefully funnel the conversation toward safer topics. They would speak in code or simply go quiet and wait for the mood to change. But for both of them, in different ways, there was now an enduring chill in their lives” 

After the abortion of their child, John and Kathy’s relationship is forever changed. However, this passage is significant because it shows how they handle every conflict or hurt in their relationship. They do not confront things. They do not share their pain; instead they go inside themselves and handle it alone. They share the ability or the desire to gloss over things. Kathy agrees to the abortion, even though the only thing she’s ever wanted from her marriage is a child. It must have been a devastating decision, yet she gave John what he wanted, or what he convinced her they both wanted. The reader can see Kathy’s growing resentment and distance from him, but John is too self-absorbed to see it.

“I don’t think it started out as an intentional lie, he just kept mum about it—who the hell wouldn’t?—and pretty soon he probably talked himself into believing it never happened at all. They guy was a magic man. He could fool people. Sure as fuck fooled me . . . Anyhow, I think that lies were sort of built into this whole repair-your-life things of his—the ambitions, the big Washington dreams—and I guess it basically boils down to a case of colossal self-deception”

Tony Carbo precisely identifies John’s reasons for not admitting his involvement in the Thuan Yen massacre, and in the process reveals that he knows John very well. He sees John’s ambitions for what they are: a way to atone, but also a way to be loved. Tony also reveals John’s biggest skill—the ability to manipulate and lie convincingly. The reader can compare the insights of Tony, Pat, and his mother Eleanor, and see that John was not really fooling anybody. People saw through him; they just didn’t challenge him on his behavior.

“She loved him so much, despite everything, just so much. She always had. But they used to have that astonishing glow all around them, which was where they lived, inside a brilliant white light that seemed to suck them up and carry them beyond all the ordinary limits, suspended there. Other marriages might go stale, but not theirs, because the law of averages had been suspended, or they were suspended above the averages … She wanted the feeling back. She wanted to believe again, just to hope and keep hoping”

Here, Kathy reveals herself to be as self-deluding as John, in her own way. Though she loves him, she refuses to see him as he is. She wants to live in the magic glow that he creates—a place where they are surrounded by love and success, where the world cannot tarnish them, where they are not like everybody else. She is complicit in his illusions and magical thinking. She wants to live in a dream world of their creation. This passage, reconstructed by the narrator, explains why she stays with John and why she finds it easy to ignore the facts of his war crimes and his other disturbing behavior.

“Wade watched them for a few seconds, wondering if he should walk over and demand the handcuffs. Blurt out a few secrets. The teakettle and the boathouse, Tell them he wasn’t sure. Just once in his life: tell everything. Talk about his father. Explain how his whole life had been managed with mirrors and that he was now totally baffled and totally turned around and had no idea how to work his way out”

John Wade has entered his own private maze in the Lake of the Woods. He knows that he’s sick; he knows that he did something. He just doesn’t know what. This is as close to a confession as the narrative comes. But what exactly is John confessing to? Mental illness? Confusion? A traumatic childhood? None of those things add up to murdering his wife. The reader must decide what kind of confession this is. 

“He regarded the lake without terror. One thing he’d learned: the world had its own sneaky little tricks. Over the past days, despite everything, the lost election had come to seem almost a windfall. He felt lighter inside, nothing left to hide. Thuan Yen was still there, of course, and always would be, but the horror was now outside him. Ugly and pitiful and public. No less evil, he thought, but at least the demands of secrecy were gone. Which was another of nature’s sly tricks. Once you’re found out, you don’t tremble at being found out. The trapdoor drops open. All you can do is fall gracefully and far and deep” 

Not only does John’s insight reveal that he is at peace with his secret coming out and the loss of the election; it demonstrates the first instance of growth that the reader has seen in this character. The weeks spent on the water looking for Kathy with Claude have given him time to think. In Claude, John finally has a friend whose respect he wants to keep. He is ready to stop pretending and to be honest with himself. This passage foreshadows John’s suicide by exposure on Lake in the Woods. There is no more magic to be done; this is his last trick, the fall through the trapdoor into the lake.