Loon Lake

Joe was a Paterson mill kid. In NYC he learned the smallness of the adult world. In Ludlow, Colorado, Warren Penfield's mother wanted him to win a scholarship and his father, Jack, wanted him to go to work. Warren is a poet. His patrons are the Bennetts. Warren had wanted to kill Bennett because he thought one of Bennett's companies had hurt his family, caused deaths, but in the end Warren is offered a position as a poet in residence at Loon Lake. Loon Lake, a setting in the Adirondacks, had been formed by a glacier. There are elaborate camps in the area, mahagony speed boats, logging roads. Poets and painters arrive with the Mayflies. F. W. Bennett marries an aviatrix. Penfield tries to teach Clara Lukacs how to play tennis. Joe of Paterson is shown around while the Bennetts are absent. There is a relaxation of rules. Joe sees the room where Bennett keeps costumes, outfits for his guests. Warren Penfield had been in the Signal Corps in World War I. Joe does not want to think about Bennett and Clara. Bennett lectures Joe on the burial practices of the ancient Indians. Joe seeks Penfield's help to arrange Clara's escape. Clara and Joe are given money by Warren and they trade in the car they left in at a lot in Dayton, Ohio. In Indiana work and housing are found at a Bennett-owned enterprise. Joe notes the irony of this fact. There are interlocking strands to the story as it is discovered a neighbor is murdered and that all along he has been employed by the security company reporting to the management. It seems he was killed by his own agency. After the aviatrix and Penfield become missing persons in a round the world flight, Clara disappears and Joe and the widow undertake a car trip to the South and to the West. In the end Joe Korzeniowski returns to Loon Lake. He reads the Penfield papers. His name is changed to Bennett. He works for the CIA until 1974.

Joe of Paterson, 'Loon Lake''s protagonist and narrator, is an apparently unschooled adolescent who thinks and writes with the verve and skill of an older, far more educated, professional writer. Reflecting upon this fact, a first reaction might be to condemn Doctorow for foisting upon us an unbelievable character, but another would be to brand Joe of Paterson a liar and then to ask why is he lying. One answer has Joe representing Doctorow's take on a spirit pervading America, for Joe's lies are lies he shares with other of the novel's characters, most notably the tycoon F.W.Bennett, and Joe, Bennett, and America itself are seen as lying in order to disguise a fundamental nature that is criminal. * Joe's method coarsely equates lying with the act of writing; this in itself is a glib notion, but Doctorow suggests the more insightful idea that America writes a poetry about itself, be this in actual verse or in its poetic vision of the capitalist dream, and the purpose of this is to dress its crimes as golden fables. Joe, after all, is a criminal. From the opening two pages he steals, he forces a girl to disrobe at knifepoint, and he justifies his actions with the exuberant exclamation, "I only wanted to be famous!". F.W.Bennett is another criminal - he associates with organised crime, with women he uses money as his knife, and his means of presiding over his industrial empire are revealed as overtly murderous. The poet, Warren Penfield, is a would-be assassin and would-be adulterer. The carnival operator, Sim Hearn, is a blank-hearted murderer. The workings of capitalism are portrayed as intimately related to crime, the implicit foundational crime being that of using people as means rather than as ends in themselves. What is secured through these means is wealth and power, but it is ultimately, and literally, sterile. * In "Loon Lake", sex does not work. It fails to provide intimacy and it, largely, fails to produce children; Bennett's only 'issue' is hydrocephalic and hidden in an institution in Sweden. It is, at best, a commodity. The American dream, as embodied in F.W.Bennett's wealth, leads to isolation. The latter is another theme in the book - the trajectory of the characters suggests that they seek isolation in order to at once be themselves, in an optimistic sense, and to escape the evil of other people, yet they find that there is no escape from human evils since they too are human with their own quotient of evil. * Lucinda Bennett, F.W.'s wife, is presented as a prize WASP. Handsome, rather than beautiful, and proud and independent, she is an ideal to which F.W. aspires, as do his proteges, Penfield and Joe. She is an aviatrix seemingly unconnected to the mundane goings on down on the ground. As a character she is empty, which hints that she might well be a symbol, probably a symbol of freedom. Her fate, then, is poignant, as freedom is lost, and with it the fat and cowardly poet (and poetry) of self-indulgence and sel

I love World's Fair and Ragtime and have read them several times each. This book is different in that there are what I would call stream-of-consciousness sections that just run in with no punctuation kind of like I'm writing here to give you an idea of it, and also there are some sections of poetry interspersed throughout (I'm not a big poetry reader, myself.) If you can get past all that, it's a good story that follows an failed poet and a young drifter and how their lives intersect. As someone else said in their review, I'd give this 5 stars, except for the literary anomalies, which knock it down to 4. Can't blame the author for trying something different...

Doctorow makes Loon Lake a much more difficult read than it needs to be. He keeps changing tense on us. He keeps switching from first to third person narrative. He keeps inserting bad poetic verse. We often don't know who is speaking, sometimes even what about. Is the narrator of the moment in a dream? A drug induced state? As looney as a loon? But in the end, Doctorow sweeps us up, and when Joe Patterson, nee Korzenioski, is up against it, we feel his pain; the tension is almost unbearable. We want good things to happen to Joe and Clara...and when he looks out the police station window to see her being taken away we want to scream with him. Then we want to see good things happen to Joe and Sandy, and maybe they are, or not. Doctorow keeps us in suspense until the last two pages when it is all laid out. And it all makes sense. It is a challenging read, but I'm glad I went down this trail. It won't be my favorite Doctorow book, but it has made a lasting impression. Especially shocking was the description of the fate of fat ladies in travelling sideshows.

Like all Doctorow, Loon Lake tells an amazingly interesting tale with vibrant, often beautiful, sometimes brutal detail. Even though few readers will be able to relate directly to the plotline (set in pre-WWII USA), Doctorow (as usual) manages to uncover universally human feeling despite the strange adventures the story depicts. A great work, but be warned: the switching from first to third person, tense shifts, and interspersion of poetry makes this a challenging work, but well worth the effort. I give it 4 instead of 5 stars only because, while great, the book is a notch below Billy Bathgate.