(2 of 2)
The novel is framed by this startling juxtaposition: starving dogs amid baronial splendor. When Joe decides to help Clara escape from her involuntary servitude, he steals a 1933 Mercedes from Bennett and starts driving through a landscape of blighted hopes and lives. He fears pursuit by Bennett; he is also worried that Clara's gangster friend may want her back. The last place Bennett would look, Joe decides, is at his own auto plant. But does Joe really take a job there of his own free will, as he believes? Or have the enormous forces of wealth and crime conspired to crush him?
Joe's story calls up some eerie echoes. Imagine The Great Gatsby set a decade later, told by its ambitious hero while he was on the make. Joe survives and triumphs through a combination of luck, animal cunning and absolute recklessness. And his tutor, ironically, is the very man he robbed. Joe never forgets his first sight of F.W. Bennett: "All the intelligence I had of him, from his house and his lands and his train and his resident poets, had not prepared me for the impersonal force of him, the frightening freedom of him." The race, Joe decides, is to the feral.
Doctorow may try to do too much in Loon Lake. When the poet Penfield reminisces about his experiences in Japan, for instance, he seems to belong in a different novel. But the author's skill at historical reconstruction, so evident in Ragtime, remains impressive here; the novel's fragments and edgy, nervous rhythms call up an age of clashing anxiety. Loon Lake tantalizes long after it is ended. As Penfield writes about the bird that gives its name to the Bennett estate, "The cry of loons once heard is not forgotten."
—By Paul Gray
Excerpt
"And then, below, a broad lake came into view, a lake glittering with the last light of the day. I stopped to look at it. Something was moving, making a straight line of agitation, like a tear, in the surface.
A moment later a bird was rising slowly from the water, a bird large enough to be seen from this distance but only against the silver phosphorescence of the water. When it rose as high as the land it was gone. . .
My vantage point was from the land side, a rise in an enormous rolling meadow beside a tennis court fenced in wood and mesh. I did not try to move closer to see in detail what was in the light of the lodge windows, all ablaze everywhere, as if great crowds were inside. I knew there were no crowds. The wind amplified in gusts the strains of a dance band. When the song was over, it began again. It was a Victrola record of a tune I recognized, Exactly Like You.
The perverse effect of this music and the lighted windows was of a repellent and desolate isolation."