Loon Lake

...Now all this, in conveying the impression that Loon Lake is a conventional novel unfolded along traditional narrative lines, is grossly misleading...

...Rather the converse of fantasy, a mockery of the fantasy: Doctorow is not writing lighthearted picaresque but a moral fable full of shadow and foreboding...

...So much for the romance of "running away from home and joining the circus...

...And what turns up next is that fairytale fantasy of childhood and ancient dream of disconnection from personal and social ties, that American dream of absolute freedom in the wild—the traveling carnival...

...Piecemeal, at wide intervals, we learn that Penfield goes off on what is intended as a round-the-world airplane trip with Bennett's wife, a celebrated flyer, and they will disappear into the blue...

...As readers and admirers of The Book of Daniel and Ragtime know, Doctorow is nothing if not a greatly accomplished, enormously skillful and resourceful, stylistically strong and subtle, highly venturesome novelist, who disdains conventional modes while disdaining even more the blandishments of mere chic (though in some of the pointlessly unpunctuated passages he succumbs) and the empty gestures of what passes for the avant garde...

...But we are asked to'take too much on faith, asked in fact to collaborate in the act of creation: a notation is not a life, an anecdote is not a myth, a dip in the lake—even a triumphantly strong swim in the shimmering waters of Loon Lake in full view of the formerly omnipotent, now aged and diminished "father"—is not a ritual rebirth...

...And then the apparition is gone, vanished into the depthless American night...

...Joe of Paterson," as he refers to himself (as if in repudiation not only of his parents but of his ethnic and class affiliations through them), lives out a variant of primary American fantasy, derived in the main from movies and books...

...Fragmentary intimations and retrospective views, recurring motifs and passages, sudden shifts and leaps in perspective and narrative voice, time and place, events left suspended only to be unexpectedly resumed later, the surprising intrusion of (deliberately) awful prosy verses, the work of Warren Penfield, a shambling, disheveled, besotted poet who is a kind of court retainer and clown, a man who has come there years before to kill Bennett (with good reason) and stayed to accept his patronage—all these and other devices and mannerisms exert a shattering pressure on the narrative surface, resulting in a fiction of parts, segments, shards, crystals...

...7 November 1980: 629 Only not quite: the bewitched boy of the romantic legend must follow the enchanted maiden...

...But though the novel itself concludes in 1936, the barebones life is swiftly foretold in highly detailed confidence to the year 1975...

...Out to the open road, the American romance of the road, and whatever may turn up next, so long as it isn't a life just like his father's, only elsewhere...

...None of this is absorbed into the narrative, or even foreshadowed by other events...

...Soul Mcdolf THE last page of E. L. Doctorow's new novel,Loon Lake, is composed entirely of a biographical digest-of-sorts, set out coldly and emptily, void of life as any computer printout or Who's Who entry...

...Given these antecedents, Doctorow seems to be saying, we can securely prophesy these developments, among others which lie within the range of 7 November 1980: 627 American possibilities of that time and place...

...Only in this anti-romantic version she is a mobster's moll, a house-gift for the host, and the mobster is the infamous Tommy Crapo, whose entrepreneurial specialty is strikebreaking and unionbusting—a highly marketable enterprise—with a little killing on the side should that regrettable necessity arise...

...The carnival's main attraction, the Fat Lady—cretinous, elephantine, a dumb mountain of meat set up for the kill, yet somehow made touching, almost delicate and lyrical by a beautiful feat of the author's sympathetic imagination—is made to take on all comers, the leering, bestial yokels pouring out of the nearby hills in the end of night for the murderous bloodbath, while the owner calmly rakes in the price of admission, the biggest gross of the season, a bundle that Joe, fleeing the scene with the owner's wife, manages to come by and which he throws to the wind in a seizure of moral revulsion...

...Only this train, the stuff of American folklore, will decisively change and ultimately determine the rest of the boy's life...

...What does a vigorous, energetic, smart, ambitious eighteen-year-old fresh out of high school (Paterson Latin, we learn on that abundant last page) who is not notably fastidious about ways of hustling a living do in the year 1936, a time not exactly overflowing with choices...

...The danger for the novelist is that the multifaceted manner, so ornate and elaborate, so contrived and selfconscious, so pervasive and inescapable—that the manner, the technical apparatus of the novel, can overwhelm the wonderfully imagined fiction itself, leaving little more than the performance, the virtuosity, the dazzling display...

...In a lighted compartment of the flashing vision the boy sees standing before her dressing mirror, appraising herself closely, a beautiful naked girl...

...Almost at that very moment he witnesses in a fleeting tableau another image of pure American fantasy: the lonesome train hurtling by in the night through the wide vistas of virgin American territory bound for strange, faraway places...

...only this one, in which he serves as roustabout and factotum, is grim and sordid, mysterious, threatening, owned by a sinister, ugly, menacingly silent, rapacious character whose season ends in a ghostly moonlit scene of grotesque horror...

...and it is only Doctorow's high seriousness, artistic conscience and powerful gifts that prevent such sundering and dissolution...

...that the boy will make his way out of Loon Lake with his trophy Clara and will lose her again to Crapo, and after that take up with the child-wife of one of Crapo's spies who is murdered not by the union organizers he has betrayed but by his employer, and that he will in the midst of their flight to California and its promises of a new life desert her, abruptly abandon her and her child, disappear while she sleeps and return to Loon Lake and his patron and the waiting future...

...First he gets out fast—out of the old neighborhood, of town, of family, all of them gone and forgotten the moment he leaves, not a tear shed, an awkward embrace enacted, not a backward glance...

...Loon Lake is a work of marvelous fragments and noble intentions, and it is unmistakably the work of a formidable writer, clearly one of the very small band of novelists here or anywhere, with a claim on our most serious attention...

...Doctorow's new novel employs strategies of discontinuity, splintering, fragmentation, and certain innovations—novelties perhaps is a better term—as the governing aesthetic principles...

...and while all of it is historically plausible, none of it, it may be argued, is artistically inevitable, or necessary...

...The romantic vision is perfectly fulfilled: this train is a private train, an imperially luxurious private train running a private track through forests and into the mountains to the Loon Lake fastness where the party of guests will disport themselves for a weekend of royal pleasure...

...If, finally, Loon Lake fails to attain the reverberant wholeness and coherence of the fully achieved work of art, it is the kind of superb "failure" which exposes the hollowness and glitter of most literary success...

...he can do no other but respond helplessly to the siren's summons...

...Having changed his name to Joseph Paterson Bennett in 1941 under this sponsorship of his patron F. W. Bennett, robber baron, who has amassed an immense industrial fortune as well as an immense estate in the Loon Lake district of die Adirondacks, we learn that en route to becoming F. W.'s surrogate son—appropriating not only Bennett's name but his fortune, estates, board directorships, trusteeships, club memberships, virtual identity, his very skin seemingly—he had embarked, after the close of the novel and with its certification, so to speak, on what is almost a parody of one version of American upper-class Wasp career: Williams College (varsity letters in lacrosse and swimming, ROTC, "Most Likely to Succeed" and incidentally an honors degree in Political Science), an Air Corps commission, OSS leading to a career in CIA and eventful elevation to its higher echelons, two failed marriages, an Ambassadorship, the ultimate possession of the lordly fiefdom of Loon Lake—a paradigm of American success...

...Commonweal: 630...

...Hardly a typical American life, but in a special sense it is a representative one...

...and Bennett, the lord of the manor, whose weekend guests have more typically included moguls, kings, artists (Chaplin among them), has had and now has mutually profitable business relations with Crapo and his thugs and gunmen...

...It is a skeletal "life" of Joseph Korzeniowski, the protagonist-narrator, from his origins in a working-class "ethnic" family in Paterson, New Jersey, to the year 1936, his astonishingly knowing eighteenth and the year (a turning-point of course for America and the world) in which most of the novel's pivotal action is centered...