Loon Lake

E.L. Doctorow's novels have taken us from the post-Civil War 1870's (The Waterworks) to the merry-go-round of early 1900's (Ragtime) and in Loon Lake, the stark world of America in the Great Depression of the 1930's, gets this author's masterful touch. This novel shows yet again how it is possible for a great writer to weave a novel out of the tiniest of circumstances. In this case, a young man from New Jersey has set off during the worst of the depression to walk the railroad tracks and seek a better life. He hears a train coming, so he steps off and is passed by a number of luxurious private railroad cars, one of which contains a beautiful, naked woman standing in front of a mirror, holding up a dress to her body. The young man elects to follow this train and winds up at Loon Lake, the vast private estate of one of the wealthiest men in the east. The young man spends some time on this estate amid the gathering of peculiar characters there-the magnet's aviatrix wife, an obese writer and would-be political assassin--and finally decides to head west. He steals a car from the billionaire who owns Loon Lake, and agrees to give a ride to a gangster's girlfriend, the woman he'd seen that night, who is trying to evade her violent criminal lover. The pair head to Indiana and settle in a factory town literally owned, brick by brick, by the industrialist whose east coast estate they'd fled. There the main character gets a job and becomes embroiled in a union versus management conflict that sets his life off in an incredible direction. The fall and rise story of the ambitious, brave-hearted young man told of in Loon Lake is little short of a metaphor for the American dream.

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...

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 self-deception.
*
Paradoxically, given the scope of its themes, the cast of this book feels small. There is no real sense of family associated with any of the characters, and they are asked to invent themselves anew. Few social connections offer stable support, since what family exists is quickly left behind, by Joe, by Clara, by Penfield, even by Sandy James, and friends too are fickle, if not outright deceivers, such as Lyle. The book thus is pervaded by a burden of loneliness. This loneliness is extended to the utter absence of God - neither does any character appeal to any personal spirituality - in "Loon Lake" the materialism of the world has a finality.
*
Doctorow has depicted Godless capitalism as purchasing the services of art, and as making a son of the ambition that arises from poverty, and as harnassing the criminal instincts to the service of economic production, all to a lonely empty end. The structure of the novel and the language employed make for a difficult read - presumably this is purposeful: Doctorow implicitly asks the reader to recognise the story as artifice, as a lie in a sense, part of its inauthenticity stemming from the fact that it is remembered, if not dreamed, this aspect being made clear by disruption in chronological flow, tense, and viewpoint. The content, and possible message, is bleak. There is an anger underlying the book, but it is a very sad anger. There are several truly horrifying scenes, where the violence is rendered palpably and sickeningly; in particular, the fate of the Fanny the Fat Lady darkens the novel - Doctorow's talent as a wordsmith is unquestionable, but his judgement in including such matter can be questioned; in itself repugnant, the scene begs to be taken as embodying a larger truth, regarding the exploitation of sex and disadvantage for profit - all this borders on being too crude. A similar level of crudity affects other symbolic material, such as Joe's failure to reach the cliched promise of California, or the savage 'Dogs of Capitalism', or the very name of one of the gangsters, Tommy Crapo. There is a danger that the novel itself comes to be an extension of Warren Penfield's bad poetry. Of course, even this might well be intentional; through its crudity, through its artifice, the novel is powerful in hooking itself into one's memory; and Doctorow could be sacrificing himself as an example of the best poet America can produce, that being a bad one.

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.