About this title: John Wade, a Vietnam veteran, loses the Minnesota gubernatorial nomination by a landslide. Humiliated and depressed, he takes off for a camping trip with his wife. Then his wife disappears. This novel about a man in torment was selected by the New York Times as one of the best books of 1994 and won the 1995 Cooper Prize for best novel on an ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780140250947ISBN:0140250948
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Some edge, corner and seam wear. Cover crease. No marks. Tight binding. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 303 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Very Good. 0395488893 This trade sized paperback book is in REAL GOOD SHAPE! ! Some creasing of the spine and some very minor signs of wear from reading--nothing major at all! SMOKE FREE HOME! Do not settle for worn, torn, throwaways. Pay a few pennies more for a book that looks a wrinkle or two away from near new! read more
"Tim O'Brien has written a novel that successfully explores the question of what is truth and illusion. Is an event the truth because it happens or is the truth what we believe happens? John Wade and his wife Kathy are recovering from a devastating political defeat at an isolated cabin on the shores of a Minnesota lake. One morning John awakens to find Kathy gone and the mystery begins or so the reader thinks. Kathy's disappearance is the surface mystery, while the real mystery in this story is what has made John Wade the man he really is. Is he the slick politician and loving husband that he appears to be or is he a murderer? O'Brien reveals slowly through the book that John Wade was a lonely boy who was taunted by an alcoholic father, who then retreats into a world of magic tricks and illusions. After his father commits suicide, he creates the father he always wanted by envisioning him in his mind behind the "mirrors" he has put up to block the painful memories. Later, O'Brien begins to tell a stunningly graphic and horrifying tale of Wade's tour as a soldier in Viet Nam. The reader is thrown again and again into the agonziing re- telling of his memories of the My Lai Massacre. Wade's personna as the "Sorcerer" helps him endure these memories without going crazy. Wade covers up this event both psychologically and phyically by altering the records, but eventually things unravel when the fact of this incident becomes public. O'Brien brilliantly uses third person narrative with fictionalized "interviews" from friends, family and people who knew the Wades as well as accounts of the investigation into the My Lai Massacre and finally different quotes from various historical events to give a real feeling to his work. As a reader you are drawn into this story as if you are reading a real event in the newspaper, it gives it a very eerie quality. There is a narrator of this story, not displayed in the traditional sense, but by small comments that appear in the footnotes of the interviews and finally taking a larger role in the end of the novel, perhaps echoing the readers point of view. This is not a mystery in the traditional sense and frustrating to some readers may be the fact that there is not a tidy ending. There are no neat conclusions and the reader is left to ponder as is the narrator, the various hypothesis and eventual outcome of John and Kathy. This is a unique, dark tale that is more about the human psyche, the tricks we play ,secrets we keep and as in the story, there are no neat endings."
"This is a real page turner, creatively beautiful and exquisitely styled. It is an exceedingly unsettling and disturbing tale weaving history and mystery together.
John Wade, is a 41 year old Viet Nam veteran whose recently failed Minnesota senatorial bid shatters his facade of success. As a child John was an illusionist and as an adult politician he honed these skills.
Seeking solace from defeat, John and his wife Kathy vacation in the deep Minnesota woods where John's tether to reality snaps. A veteran of the My Lai massacre, John's flashbacks merge with the present day in a frightening nightmare quality.
Late one night while boiling a kettle of water for tea, John decides to boil and kill the houseplants. Mentally disorganized and rapidly deteriorating, he vaguely remembers the possibility of walking down the hall to his wife's bedroom with another pot of boiling water...then awakens the next day to find her gone.
O'Brien is masterful in his ability to use the dark woods as a metaphor regarding inner secrets and demons, blending illusion with reality as we walk the slippery path of insanity with John in his search for truth.
"The story focuses around a washed-up Senator, John Wade, who is trying to escape the secrets from his past that have destroyed his life. After losing by a landslide in the election, Wade and his wife Kathy take a vacation to a small, remote cabin, located in a place called Lake of the Woods. When the demons of his wartime actions haunt him (Wade is a Vietnam vet who took part in a massacre of a village) he spends a night boiling water, killing plants in the cabin, and whispering, "Kill Jesus." The next day, Kathy has disappeared, and an investigation ensues.
The reason I thought this book was so good is because you never find out what happened to Kathy; she's never found, and the mystery of that evening is never figured out. There are chapters that alternate between present action, hypotheses about what might have happened (and these range from Kathy getting lost in the woods to Wade killing her), and even chapters called "Evidence," in which quotations from characters and outside book sources are listed. This all blends together to read in a unique, intriguing way that allows the book to flow through what might otherwise be a stagnant amount of events."
I read The Things They Carried, and loved it. I think it handled the war and all of the surrounding problems perfectly, and the way that the narrative circled back on itself over and over again was inventive and interesting.
Here, it looks forced. Also, you could probably tell it was an O'Brien book even if his name wasn't on it. Look at the smiliar plot devices: native american soldier the lead character serves with in Vietnam? Check. Main character on a boat with the chance to escape to Canada to freedom? Check. Casual mention of a person blown up into the trees, a la Curt Lemon in TTTC? Check.
Obviously, there's a lot that's different, but there are things that I think could have been handled differently, and better. One of the best parts of the book comes towards the end when we find out that Wade took the time to carefully edit himself out of the My Lai massacre before leaving Vietnam. It shows a deliberate side of Wade that we see very little of. This should have been alluded to better, and was it just the one letter that got Wade caught? Or is there more? That's left out.
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