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Loon Lake
It is America in the great depression, and he is a child of that time, that place. He runs away from home in Paterson, New Jersey, to New York City and learns the bare bones of life before he hits the road with a traveling carnival. Then one icy night in the Adirondacks, the young man sees a private train roar by. In its lit windows, he spies an industrial tycoon, a poet, a gangster, and a heartbreakingly beautiful girl. He follows them, as one follows a dream, to an isolated private estate on Loon Lake.
Thus the stage is set for a spellbinding tale of mystery and menace, greed and ambition, harsh lust and tender love, that lays bare the darkest depths of the human heart and the nightmarish underside of the American dream. E. L. Doctorow has written a novel aglow with poetry and passion, lit by the burning fire of humanity and history, terror and truth.
Thus the stage is set for a spellbinding tale of mystery and menace, greed and ambition, harsh lust and tender love, that lays bare the darkest depths of the human heart and the nightmarish underside of the American dream. E. L. Doctorow has written a novel aglow with poetry and passion, lit by the burning fire of humanity and history, terror and truth.
255 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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About the author
E.L. Doctorow
100 books1,146 followersHistory based known novels of American writer Edgar Laurence Doctorow. His works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The Waterworks, and All the Time in the World. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN Faulkner Awards, The Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short listed for the Man Booker International Prize honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN Saul Bellow Award given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career places him in the highest rank of American Literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 145 reviews
March 11, 2021
Loon Lake is extremely complex, full of unexpected turns and hard to penetrate. The nonlinear evolutions of the plot don’t help either but in the long run it’s one of the best novels by E. L. Doctorow and it surely is my most favourite.
Nothing but hate can fill up an abyss between the rich and the dispossessed.
The man resisted all approaches he was stone he was steel I hated his grief his luxurious dereliction I hated his thoughts the quality of his voice his walk the way he spent his life proving his importance ritualizing his superiority his exercises of freedom his arrogant knowledge of the human heart I hated the back of his neck he was a killer of poets and explorers, a killer of boys and girls and he killed with as little thought as he gave to breathing, he killed by breathing he killed by existing he was an emperor, a maniac force in pantaloons and silk slippers and lacquered headdress dispensing like treasure pieces of his stool, making us throw ourselves on our faces to be beheaded one by one with gratitude…
Nothing but hate can fill up an abyss between the rich and the dispossessed.
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October 15, 2009This may be the worst book I've ever read. I'm not kidding. It was awful. Celebrated author, intriguing cover copy, great reviews . . . but it was a complete and utter mess of unmitigated dreck. It wasn't just the fact that the narrative switches back and forth between third person, first person, and bad poetry; or the fact that rules of grammar and punctuation don't seem to exist, making it necessary to go back and read the same sentence several times in the hopes of figuring out what it's saying; but the fact that scenes and characters come out of the blue, go back and forth in time, and have no cohesion whatsoever that makes this book truly bad.
I'm still not sure what it was about. One of the characters in the book is a poet, and when he gives a book of his work to another character, he says, "The signatures in this one are out of order. But no matter, no matter." I think the same could be said for Loon Lake. Honestly, I was determined to finish it because I'd hoped it would improve, that the story would somehow come together in the end in a way that made the torture worthwhile. Nope. Not so much. Just so bad! I can't believe I actually wasted my time on it! Argh!!!
I'm still not sure what it was about. One of the characters in the book is a poet, and when he gives a book of his work to another character, he says, "The signatures in this one are out of order. But no matter, no matter." I think the same could be said for Loon Lake. Honestly, I was determined to finish it because I'd hoped it would improve, that the story would somehow come together in the end in a way that made the torture worthwhile. Nope. Not so much. Just so bad! I can't believe I actually wasted my time on it! Argh!!!
April 30, 2022
Doctorow is one of my all time favourite authors. Other than City of God I have throughly enjoyed everything he has written.
This was no exception, and for me at least, stands out as one of his very best.
Set in 1936, it follows the crossed paths of a young vagabond and an older, and apparently failed poet, both of whom love a tormented beauty and both of whom wind up being taken care of by a famous tycoon.
The narrator, for most part, Joe Korzeniowski, 18 years old when the novel begins, shakes off his working class background of the Great Depression in Paterson, New Jersey, his childhood, and even his surname, and heads for California as a hobo, but stops off to work as a carnival, befriending Fanny the Fat Lady, a 600 pound "retarded whore freak" who services hordes of men in feral orgies.
Fat and drunken poet, Warren Penfield was from Ludlow, Colorado, and had a bizarre heroism in the Great War, then spent years in a Japanese monastery, before arriving at automobile mogul, FW Bennett's Loon Lake estate in the Adirondacks.
In 1936, the wandering Joe also arrives at Loon Lake; having followed a beautiful woman riding a train carriage. He trespasses, is attacked by dogs, and wakes up in the care of the estate staff. For some reason, FW Bennett takes to him.
Among Bennett’s entourage are an aviatrix third wife, the sodden poet Penfield, an ‘industrial consultant’ or bodyguard, Thomas Crapo (alias ‘Tommy the Emperor’) and Crapo’s girl, Clara. Joe is taken on as a servant, only to elope after a few months with Clara. On the run, he gets a job in one of Bennett’s factories. There is a strike; the strike is broken, as are some of Joe’s bones.
This may lack the historical propellant of some of Doctorow’s other work, Ragtime or The Book of Daniel for example, but it has the same assertion, that the tentacles of capitalism reach everywhere. Joe is as exploited by Bennett and his people at Loon Lake as he was by his humble and labouring parents who he abandoned - a cynical commentary on Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The novel has many brilliant parts, a series of dazzling solo performances which follow each other in rapid succession. If there’s a quibble, it’s how they come together. But that’s nitpicking. There is also the wonderful period detail that is a trademark of Doctorow’s work.
Here’s a clip of Joe of Paterson on the hobo road as a boy..
This was no exception, and for me at least, stands out as one of his very best.
Set in 1936, it follows the crossed paths of a young vagabond and an older, and apparently failed poet, both of whom love a tormented beauty and both of whom wind up being taken care of by a famous tycoon.
The narrator, for most part, Joe Korzeniowski, 18 years old when the novel begins, shakes off his working class background of the Great Depression in Paterson, New Jersey, his childhood, and even his surname, and heads for California as a hobo, but stops off to work as a carnival, befriending Fanny the Fat Lady, a 600 pound "retarded whore freak" who services hordes of men in feral orgies.
Fat and drunken poet, Warren Penfield was from Ludlow, Colorado, and had a bizarre heroism in the Great War, then spent years in a Japanese monastery, before arriving at automobile mogul, FW Bennett's Loon Lake estate in the Adirondacks.
In 1936, the wandering Joe also arrives at Loon Lake; having followed a beautiful woman riding a train carriage. He trespasses, is attacked by dogs, and wakes up in the care of the estate staff. For some reason, FW Bennett takes to him.
Among Bennett’s entourage are an aviatrix third wife, the sodden poet Penfield, an ‘industrial consultant’ or bodyguard, Thomas Crapo (alias ‘Tommy the Emperor’) and Crapo’s girl, Clara. Joe is taken on as a servant, only to elope after a few months with Clara. On the run, he gets a job in one of Bennett’s factories. There is a strike; the strike is broken, as are some of Joe’s bones.
This may lack the historical propellant of some of Doctorow’s other work, Ragtime or The Book of Daniel for example, but it has the same assertion, that the tentacles of capitalism reach everywhere. Joe is as exploited by Bennett and his people at Loon Lake as he was by his humble and labouring parents who he abandoned - a cynical commentary on Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The novel has many brilliant parts, a series of dazzling solo performances which follow each other in rapid succession. If there’s a quibble, it’s how they come together. But that’s nitpicking. There is also the wonderful period detail that is a trademark of Doctorow’s work.
Here’s a clip of Joe of Paterson on the hobo road as a boy..
I made acquaintance of a maid she had an eye for me she like my innocent face. She was an older woman, some kind of Scandinavian wore hair in braids. She was no great shakes but she had her own room and late one night I was admitted and led up all the flights of this mansion and brought to a small bathroom top floor at the back. She sat me in a claw-foot tub and gave me a bath, this hefty hot steaming red-faced woman. I don’t remember her name Hilda Bertha something like that, and she knows herself well before we make love she pulls a pillow over her head to muffle the noise she makes and it is really interesting to go at this great chunky energetic big-bellied soft-assed flop-titted but headless woman, teasing it with a touch, watching it quiver, hearing its muffled squeaks, composing a fuck for it, the likes of which I like to imagine she has never known.
March 21, 2020
A Vöcsök-tó ura Mr. Bennett, a dúsgazdag mágnás. Nem tipikus mágnás, de képzeljük el őt ezúttal tipikus mágnásként: frakk, cilinder, vaskos szivar a szájban, ami takarni hivatott a megvető mosolyt azokkal szemben, akik nem pont olyan dúsgazdag mágnások, mint ő. Ameddig a szem ellát, minden az övé: az erdő, a fodrozódás a víz tükrén, de még a tó halainak gondolatai is. Birodalmát kerítés veszi körül, a kerítésen túl pedig vérmes kutyafalkák garázdálkodnak, elvadult, gazdáik emlékét feledő ebek bandái, akik lerántanak mindenkit, ha lehet. Az egyik ilyen vadkutya – és itt most tényleg átmegyek metaforikusba – Joe, a szegény nagyvárosi srác, munkás szülők porontya, tolvaj, rabló, csavargó, akinek sikerül átrágnia magát a kerítésen, és beférkőznie a Paradicsomba. Hogy ott háziasítják-e, vagy épp azáltal tud ott megragadni, hogy megőrzi a vadkutyák ambícióit, nos, ez a regény tétje.
Az a gyanúm, hogy Doctorow nem bízik a saját történetében. Hogy elég ereje lesz ennek a szimpla karrierregénynek, ha lineárisan vezet minket végig rajta. Inkább szétkapja és újra összerakja, csak épp nem mindig érzem, hogy indokoltan. Itt van például egyik központi figurája, Warren Penfield, az önjelölt költő, aki Bennett házi lírikusaként tengeti napjait. Ha akarom, és hajlamos vagyok olvasatokat eszkábálni magamnak, akkor ő Joe párhuzamos énje, jó pár évvel idősebben, kiégettebben, kövérebben – puszta jelenlétével arra figyelmezteti Joe-t, hogy miféle Hamlet lesz majd belőle, ha nem találja meg magában Fortinbras tetterejét. De ha épp morózus pillanatban kapott el a szöveg (mint most), akkor azt gondolom, Penfield csak azért került bele a szövegbe, hogy a szerző elsüthessen egy csomó erősen politikus szabadverset, amelyek különben az íróasztalfiókban maradtak volna*. Szóval: metablöff. Végig efféle kétségekkel harcoltam olvasás közben. Látom Doctorow plasztikus karakterrajzain, vagy a cselekményvezetés bizonyos szilánkjaiban, hogy kiváló képességű íróról van szó, de az egész mégis kicsit túl eklektikus, összehányt, vagy mondhatni, avantgárd. Inkább fárasztott most, mint értékeltem.
* Különben nem olyan rossz szabadversek ezek. Enyhén a beatirodalomra emlékeztetnek, még enyhébben Whitmanre. Bár ki tud egy jó szabadverset megkülönböztetni egy rossz szabadverstől, kérdezhetnétek erre. Mit tudom én.
Az a gyanúm, hogy Doctorow nem bízik a saját történetében. Hogy elég ereje lesz ennek a szimpla karrierregénynek, ha lineárisan vezet minket végig rajta. Inkább szétkapja és újra összerakja, csak épp nem mindig érzem, hogy indokoltan. Itt van például egyik központi figurája, Warren Penfield, az önjelölt költő, aki Bennett házi lírikusaként tengeti napjait. Ha akarom, és hajlamos vagyok olvasatokat eszkábálni magamnak, akkor ő Joe párhuzamos énje, jó pár évvel idősebben, kiégettebben, kövérebben – puszta jelenlétével arra figyelmezteti Joe-t, hogy miféle Hamlet lesz majd belőle, ha nem találja meg magában Fortinbras tetterejét. De ha épp morózus pillanatban kapott el a szöveg (mint most), akkor azt gondolom, Penfield csak azért került bele a szövegbe, hogy a szerző elsüthessen egy csomó erősen politikus szabadverset, amelyek különben az íróasztalfiókban maradtak volna*. Szóval: metablöff. Végig efféle kétségekkel harcoltam olvasás közben. Látom Doctorow plasztikus karakterrajzain, vagy a cselekményvezetés bizonyos szilánkjaiban, hogy kiváló képességű íróról van szó, de az egész mégis kicsit túl eklektikus, összehányt, vagy mondhatni, avantgárd. Inkább fárasztott most, mint értékeltem.
* Különben nem olyan rossz szabadversek ezek. Enyhén a beatirodalomra emlékeztetnek, még enyhébben Whitmanre. Bár ki tud egy jó szabadverset megkülönböztetni egy rossz szabadverstől, kérdezhetnétek erre. Mit tudom én.
May 7, 2016
I read this book only a little more than two weeks ago, but when I recall its various, disparate episodes and characters and how they may be made to cohere, I find myself going back to the book’s final image. Meanwhile, the real conclusion to this novel-cum-dossier about characters in the orbit of Loon Lake is the bio/CV of Joseph Korzeniowski aka Joe of Paterson or Joe Paterson. The final words in this CV—“Master of Loon Lake”—serve to caption the fore mentioned final image: Joe Paterson lolling in the middle of a placid, forested mountain lake, showing himself off to his appreciative patron, industrialist and union breaker, F.W. Bennett. Image and caption suggest the serenity of a Japanese ink and wash print, where the Orient’s heron has been replaced with an American loon.
This is a complex novel, with many of the signatures seemingly out of place (as was the case with Warren Penfield’s self-published volume of poetry). There are shifts in first and third person, time shifts in the narratives of the principal characters, and sections written/presented in a stream-of-conscious manner by those same principals, with little or no concern for punctuation—though the syntax (Doctorow’s cleverly unobtrusive manipulation) keeps these sections intelligible. What does all this manipulation of voice, tense, period, and point of view have to contribute to the basic story? In fact, what is the basic story? If called on to find that locus, it would be the titular Loon Lake, the hub around which characters’ lives spin out, backward and forward in time and place.
Why, when the story seems be the lake—situated in the Adirondacks of upstate New York in 1936—does the story concern itself with the maladroit adventures of two men who, nearly a decade apart, stumble into the preserve and sanctuary of the otherworldly Loon Lake? Joe of Paterson’s life has been one of urban poverty and familial neglect and abuse as the scion of immigrants to that New Jersey city. At the age of 17, in 1936, he flees his parents and his circumstances in Paterson, and takes to the road, but he quickly learns to avoid the masses of Depression-era hoboes in order to make his own way, hiring on for a season as a roustabout in a small circus. When the summer ends, and he has opportunity to steal away with the circus owner’s wife, he strikes out on his own again and has a singular vision of a woman in a luxurious, well-lit private train car. His wanderings bring him to Loon Lake, where he finds the private train again, and where for a short while he resides as a convalescent and then as a worker.
Warren Penfield has arrived at Loon Lake by a more circuitous route, his life fully underway, having endured as a youth his family’s itinerant existence as hard-scrabble union miners in Colorado, a short stay in a sanitarium, service in France during World War I, a short stint as a union man in Seattle, then a longer period in Japan, much of it as a zen acolyte. In all his peregrinations Warren Penfield has sought to understand a spirit that accompanies him, which he encounters as a series of archetypal women in different times and places, and which spirit he tries to capture in mediocre free-verse poetry. Propelled by the desire to kill F.W. Bennett, the industrialist and union breaker behind the deaths of people he’s known, Warren makes his way to Loon Lake in 1930. Like Joe, he is attacked and injured by wild dogs and spends time there convalescing. Bennett, even aware of Warren’s intent, gives him lodging and sets him up as the lake’s poet in residence.
For the fulfillment of their separate visions of the girl Clara—a young, uncouth, urban woman who is given by a mobster to serve as Bennett’s mistress—Warren and Joe work together to help her escape from the lake, and Joe accompanies her on a meandering flight to Indiana. Joe goes to work on the car assembly line at a plant owned by Bennett, figuring it best to hide in plain sight. Union and plant security intrigues ensue, and Joe is embroiled, narrowly escaping charges that he was behind the death of a plant spy embedded in union activities. Meanwhile, Clara, tiring of the drudgery of an honest living, runs off again with the mobster. Joe then returns to Loon Lake and, playing on Bennett’s good will towards him, makes himself the tycoon’s ward and adoptive son.
Two women are principal attractions to the men in this novel: the fore mentioned Clara and the aviatrix Lucinda Bennett, F.W.’s wife. Around these two women are overt angel/whore and patrician/proletarian polarities, and they inspire coincident flights and paths for Joe and Warren: while Joe tries and fails to forge an ordinary life with Clara, Warren accompanies Lucinda on her plane to Japan and vanishes somewhere in the Pacific. Bennett himself is for a while master of both, but when he loses wife and mistress, he falls into decrepit lassitude. Joe’s return to Loon Lake is tonic, and he is able to cede to Joe a restorative and benevolent affection. Each is in a harmonious equipoise, free even of the countervailing forces represented by Clara and Lucinda.
So, there is finally the matter of Joe’s life that follows—college student, WWII flight officer, then a 25-year career as director the CIA—and how that corresponds to the presentation of the novel. I suggested with the word “dossier” that the information about Joe, Bennett, Clara, Lucinda, et al., is in the nature of a data dump, which idea is echoed in Warren’s poetry—“Data linkage escape this is not an emergency / Come with me compound with me”— and when he invites his auditor to “compute with me.” A later chapter, alluding to Joe’s access to information as an intelligence officer, speaks of the data and countervailing data surrounding the life of F.W. Bennett. But even if this is a data dump, a disorganized purging of information from some central storage, why is it presented with the signatures out of sequence and in so many different voices and formats? Does the artistry of disorganization (a dissembling of chaos) lead to the vision of peace and stasis, where the fount of everything is a quiet lake in the Adirondacks? The questions raised are very zen, in the manner of a koan-like riddle that niggles at the conscious mind, begging answers that will not compute. Hyper-rationality turns into a sort of paranoia—exhibited when Joe is held in the murder of the company/union counterspy—and Joe is lucky to have escaped both the cops and the pitfall of ever multiplying explanations.
Giving the author credit for a design meant to elicit a particular effect, the novel suggests we might find resolution in irresolution, in a stasis where there is no desire, where attractions are not merely offset but simply cease to exist. But is the seeming randomness and scattering of different characters, scenes, narrative voices, and styles against the background of a specific historical epoch to be trusted? Does it all cohere? Is there meaning beyond the reader’s instinct to forge meaning? Is the reader’s progress a pilgrim’s progress, a parallel to older and wiser Joe’s self-reflective meandering through his early life, whilst surrounded by an assortment of texts and data? There is no one who will reply: I see only the image of a man in his boat upon the still waters of a lake surrounded by mountains, a single loon rising up from a ripple in the water...
This is a complex novel, with many of the signatures seemingly out of place (as was the case with Warren Penfield’s self-published volume of poetry). There are shifts in first and third person, time shifts in the narratives of the principal characters, and sections written/presented in a stream-of-conscious manner by those same principals, with little or no concern for punctuation—though the syntax (Doctorow’s cleverly unobtrusive manipulation) keeps these sections intelligible. What does all this manipulation of voice, tense, period, and point of view have to contribute to the basic story? In fact, what is the basic story? If called on to find that locus, it would be the titular Loon Lake, the hub around which characters’ lives spin out, backward and forward in time and place.
Why, when the story seems be the lake—situated in the Adirondacks of upstate New York in 1936—does the story concern itself with the maladroit adventures of two men who, nearly a decade apart, stumble into the preserve and sanctuary of the otherworldly Loon Lake? Joe of Paterson’s life has been one of urban poverty and familial neglect and abuse as the scion of immigrants to that New Jersey city. At the age of 17, in 1936, he flees his parents and his circumstances in Paterson, and takes to the road, but he quickly learns to avoid the masses of Depression-era hoboes in order to make his own way, hiring on for a season as a roustabout in a small circus. When the summer ends, and he has opportunity to steal away with the circus owner’s wife, he strikes out on his own again and has a singular vision of a woman in a luxurious, well-lit private train car. His wanderings bring him to Loon Lake, where he finds the private train again, and where for a short while he resides as a convalescent and then as a worker.
Warren Penfield has arrived at Loon Lake by a more circuitous route, his life fully underway, having endured as a youth his family’s itinerant existence as hard-scrabble union miners in Colorado, a short stay in a sanitarium, service in France during World War I, a short stint as a union man in Seattle, then a longer period in Japan, much of it as a zen acolyte. In all his peregrinations Warren Penfield has sought to understand a spirit that accompanies him, which he encounters as a series of archetypal women in different times and places, and which spirit he tries to capture in mediocre free-verse poetry. Propelled by the desire to kill F.W. Bennett, the industrialist and union breaker behind the deaths of people he’s known, Warren makes his way to Loon Lake in 1930. Like Joe, he is attacked and injured by wild dogs and spends time there convalescing. Bennett, even aware of Warren’s intent, gives him lodging and sets him up as the lake’s poet in residence.
For the fulfillment of their separate visions of the girl Clara—a young, uncouth, urban woman who is given by a mobster to serve as Bennett’s mistress—Warren and Joe work together to help her escape from the lake, and Joe accompanies her on a meandering flight to Indiana. Joe goes to work on the car assembly line at a plant owned by Bennett, figuring it best to hide in plain sight. Union and plant security intrigues ensue, and Joe is embroiled, narrowly escaping charges that he was behind the death of a plant spy embedded in union activities. Meanwhile, Clara, tiring of the drudgery of an honest living, runs off again with the mobster. Joe then returns to Loon Lake and, playing on Bennett’s good will towards him, makes himself the tycoon’s ward and adoptive son.
Two women are principal attractions to the men in this novel: the fore mentioned Clara and the aviatrix Lucinda Bennett, F.W.’s wife. Around these two women are overt angel/whore and patrician/proletarian polarities, and they inspire coincident flights and paths for Joe and Warren: while Joe tries and fails to forge an ordinary life with Clara, Warren accompanies Lucinda on her plane to Japan and vanishes somewhere in the Pacific. Bennett himself is for a while master of both, but when he loses wife and mistress, he falls into decrepit lassitude. Joe’s return to Loon Lake is tonic, and he is able to cede to Joe a restorative and benevolent affection. Each is in a harmonious equipoise, free even of the countervailing forces represented by Clara and Lucinda.
So, there is finally the matter of Joe’s life that follows—college student, WWII flight officer, then a 25-year career as director the CIA—and how that corresponds to the presentation of the novel. I suggested with the word “dossier” that the information about Joe, Bennett, Clara, Lucinda, et al., is in the nature of a data dump, which idea is echoed in Warren’s poetry—“Data linkage escape this is not an emergency / Come with me compound with me”— and when he invites his auditor to “compute with me.” A later chapter, alluding to Joe’s access to information as an intelligence officer, speaks of the data and countervailing data surrounding the life of F.W. Bennett. But even if this is a data dump, a disorganized purging of information from some central storage, why is it presented with the signatures out of sequence and in so many different voices and formats? Does the artistry of disorganization (a dissembling of chaos) lead to the vision of peace and stasis, where the fount of everything is a quiet lake in the Adirondacks? The questions raised are very zen, in the manner of a koan-like riddle that niggles at the conscious mind, begging answers that will not compute. Hyper-rationality turns into a sort of paranoia—exhibited when Joe is held in the murder of the company/union counterspy—and Joe is lucky to have escaped both the cops and the pitfall of ever multiplying explanations.
Giving the author credit for a design meant to elicit a particular effect, the novel suggests we might find resolution in irresolution, in a stasis where there is no desire, where attractions are not merely offset but simply cease to exist. But is the seeming randomness and scattering of different characters, scenes, narrative voices, and styles against the background of a specific historical epoch to be trusted? Does it all cohere? Is there meaning beyond the reader’s instinct to forge meaning? Is the reader’s progress a pilgrim’s progress, a parallel to older and wiser Joe’s self-reflective meandering through his early life, whilst surrounded by an assortment of texts and data? There is no one who will reply: I see only the image of a man in his boat upon the still waters of a lake surrounded by mountains, a single loon rising up from a ripple in the water...
October 20, 2014
I would say Loon Lake is the best E.L. Doctorow novel I have read thus far (I even hazard to say Loon Lake is the superior of Ragtime). Others have called it confusing, difficult, compromised by bad poetry, etc., but I found the out-of-chronological order and first-person-narrative jumping exciting. The use of verse to reprise the prose was a way of angling the story slightly differently so the reader can admire the way the light strikes it on different facets. Doctorow's occasional decision to present the verse version ahead of the narrative version has the cinematic/musical effect of rushing the reader down a wormhole into the scene or leaping into a new verse on a backward cymbal hit. This, along with the riveting stream-of-consciousness vignettes, give Loon Lake a rhythmic quality unlikely to appear in a straightforward, linear story.
The stream-of-consciousness segments are what truly make Loon Lake the success it is. In the past, I've had trouble with stream-of-consciousness prose, chiefly because the authors themselves were too eccentric in their own consciousness and decided to imbue their subjects with the same inscrutability (Joyce, Wolfe, Dos Passos). Doctorow writes such accessible, plausible characters that their streams of consciousness are logical and feel like natural motions, like being masterfully led in a dance.
And - I realize this sounds cheap and corny - the fact that Loon Lake has a relatively ( but plausibly) happy ending gives the book a clean finish. The novel's horrific scenes make the reader apprehensive that Loon Lake will play out like a Coen Brothers movie (of the Fargo, No Country for Old Men variety) by the end. Don't think of this as a spoiler; consider it reassurance: Loon Lake is not a crushing despair. It's a great novel, one any Doctorow fan should seek out.
The stream-of-consciousness segments are what truly make Loon Lake the success it is. In the past, I've had trouble with stream-of-consciousness prose, chiefly because the authors themselves were too eccentric in their own consciousness and decided to imbue their subjects with the same inscrutability (Joyce, Wolfe, Dos Passos). Doctorow writes such accessible, plausible characters that their streams of consciousness are logical and feel like natural motions, like being masterfully led in a dance.
And - I realize this sounds cheap and corny - the fact that Loon Lake has a relatively ( but plausibly) happy ending gives the book a clean finish. The novel's horrific scenes make the reader apprehensive that Loon Lake will play out like a Coen Brothers movie (of the Fargo, No Country for Old Men variety) by the end. Don't think of this as a spoiler; consider it reassurance: Loon Lake is not a crushing despair. It's a great novel, one any Doctorow fan should seek out.
July 22, 2018
Let me preface this with this: I LOVE E.L. Doctorow. Loved City of God. Loved Ragtime. Loved The Book of Daniel. So, ok...I didn't LOVE Homer & Langley, but at least I didn't finish the book thinking I had lost my facility to comprehend English.
I wish I could tell you I know what this book is about. There's a con-man/fugitive "protagonist" who is not at all likeable or even interestingly evil. There's a bizarre ladylove who dances in and out of self-respect every chapter or so. The most interesting character is a maid, who disappears from the narrative fairly early on. The depressed and eccentric poet holds promise, yet he also vanishes.
I get that this was an experiment. There are moments of that great Doctorow language that I treasure. But as a coherent book it fails. I totally understand that some people find this work a "stunning masterpiece" and "utterly compelling." Variety is definitely the spice of life, and I am probably the dry saltine of literature here, but this one really did not do it for me.
I wish I could tell you I know what this book is about. There's a con-man/fugitive "protagonist" who is not at all likeable or even interestingly evil. There's a bizarre ladylove who dances in and out of self-respect every chapter or so. The most interesting character is a maid, who disappears from the narrative fairly early on. The depressed and eccentric poet holds promise, yet he also vanishes.
I get that this was an experiment. There are moments of that great Doctorow language that I treasure. But as a coherent book it fails. I totally understand that some people find this work a "stunning masterpiece" and "utterly compelling." Variety is definitely the spice of life, and I am probably the dry saltine of literature here, but this one really did not do it for me.
February 26, 2019
Loon Lake, a work of fiction, by E. L. Doctorow is set in the North Eastern part of the U. S. during the great depression. Joe the main character decides to journey in search of wealth and happiness during this dark and impoverished period of history. His travels bring him to a millionaire, which is quite unusual for anyone to be so rich and to the wealthy man’s Catskill Mountains summer home. This is quite similar to his other book World’s Fair with a change of perspective, in the former Joe is an adult and in the latter a child.
November 27, 2017
I first came across E.L. Doctorow when I was in my twenties. I was reading a lot of American writers who I thought of as 1960s writers and Doctorow fitted in. His work was wittily experimental, self-consciously used past literary styles, could often be described as pastiche, often switched perspective, was playful, he played literary games...the new buzz word at the time for all this was ‘postmodernist’. But Doctorow differed from writers such as Thomas Pynchon, because, while for Pynchon the playfulness and experimentation was a thing in and for itself, for Doctorow they had a purpose: through the 1970s and ‘80s Doctorow published a series of five novels that investigated the history of the Twentieth Century United States: he explored the past to discover the present. Loon Lake is the central volume in this series and, although its reputation doesn’t seem to be overwhelming, I think it is one of the finest and more remarkable. Another variation on Huckleberry Finn, here 18 year old Joe Korzeniowski sets out from New Jersey to travel 1930s America and reinvent himself as Joe Patterson, but while Finn travelled an America fractured by slavery, Joe’s Depression America is fractured by wealth and poverty and that most taboo of American subjects, class struggle. There is not a clean narrative, it switches perspective, switches time lines, fractures into shortish passages, cuts back on its chronology, sometimes switches from first to third person...this is ‘strange’ (although not that strange for anyone who has read Pynchon, Barthelme, Brautigan or other American writers of the 1960s and ‘70s...and the skipping though time had been used in cinema for the previous 20 years) and one of its effects is to draw us up, make us slow down, not rush from one narrative incident to the next, consider their purpose and relationship to each other...and, it should be emphasized, it makes it fun. But the methods are also important in forming the book’s response to its historical material: the past is not set and easily identifiable, but can constantly be interpreted and reinterpreted, it is contested, it has to be constructed and we never construct it innocently, but always with ulterior motives. Like all great novels (and I think this is a great novel) Loon Lake demands that we participate in its construction, not consume it as disposable product. There is, however, a second central consciousness within the narrative, the failed poet Warren Penfield: he works well as a contrast to Joe, the passive against the active, but I find the passages centred on his perspective less successful than those around Joe. Focused on two male characters, the women of the novel are largely subjects of the story, given little active force: this seems to me to be a limitation of the novel, not a failure. The work finishes with an ironic happy ending, Joe achieving the American dream, but seemingly losing his vivacity and humanity.
October 11, 2019
Gets one star for its experimental writing style, which, while challenging at times, was ultimately interestingly executed. Loses four stars for a complete inability to write a female character without morbidly over sexualizing her or distilling her to her appearance, and despising her for it.
I don't believe books need to (always) provide some sort of great moral framework, but I also don't think any novel should be allowed to scrape by with characters that are as frustratingly two dimensional as the women of this book.
The scattered style and plot of this book are meant to be grounded by the story of our main character, Joe who, while clearly not meant to be seen as "moral hero on a journey," barely even fits the standard of "passably likeable protagonist" - - and describes himself in great detail assaulting both of his romantic partners in language that suggests arousal rather than shame or regret. It's not just that the character has no discernible journey or growth from the beginning of the book to its end; it's that the whole novel appears to be an exercise in futility and a third of its cast of characters are never developed beyond ineffective, poorly written foils.
Also, not necessarily one to get up in arms about nudity, but if this novel described female genitilia one more time I was going to throw it off my fire escape.
All of this is really unfortunate because the descriptive passages are often beautifully and fluidly written and some of the (male) supporting characters are truly interesting and I'm sad the author didn't delve into them more deeply.
Truly only finished this one because I wanted to complete the good reads book challenge on time, and also because I didn't feel I had the right to an opinion without finishing the book in its entirety. Would not recommend to any other readers.
I don't believe books need to (always) provide some sort of great moral framework, but I also don't think any novel should be allowed to scrape by with characters that are as frustratingly two dimensional as the women of this book.
The scattered style and plot of this book are meant to be grounded by the story of our main character, Joe who, while clearly not meant to be seen as "moral hero on a journey," barely even fits the standard of "passably likeable protagonist" - - and describes himself in great detail assaulting both of his romantic partners in language that suggests arousal rather than shame or regret. It's not just that the character has no discernible journey or growth from the beginning of the book to its end; it's that the whole novel appears to be an exercise in futility and a third of its cast of characters are never developed beyond ineffective, poorly written foils.
Also, not necessarily one to get up in arms about nudity, but if this novel described female genitilia one more time I was going to throw it off my fire escape.
All of this is really unfortunate because the descriptive passages are often beautifully and fluidly written and some of the (male) supporting characters are truly interesting and I'm sad the author didn't delve into them more deeply.
Truly only finished this one because I wanted to complete the good reads book challenge on time, and also because I didn't feel I had the right to an opinion without finishing the book in its entirety. Would not recommend to any other readers.
January 10, 2013
Originally published on my blog here in December 2001.
One of Doctorow's more experimental novels, Loon Lake presents a bewildering collection of different techniques: traditional narratives, stream of consciousness, poetry. It is also a novel which continually reminds the reader of others, possibly an easy way for an author to put himself in the tradition of the great American novel; among those which are brought to mind are The Grapes of Wrath and the U.S.A. trilogy.
Loon Lake, a retreat for millionaire industrialist F.W. Bennett in the 1920s, is the central setting of the novel. Young hobo Joe turns up there, entranced by a woman seen through the windows of a private railway carriage. There too is poet Warren Penfield, Bennett's pensioner; as the novel follows Joe's path after he meets Bennett and leaves Loon Lake, so too in parallel it describes Penfield's journey there. (The mixed up chronology contributes to the experimental feeling of the novel.)
A difficult read, with even the most traditional parts of the narrative flipping between first and third person, Loon Lake is also atmospheric and interesting for a reader prepared to make the effort.
One of Doctorow's more experimental novels, Loon Lake presents a bewildering collection of different techniques: traditional narratives, stream of consciousness, poetry. It is also a novel which continually reminds the reader of others, possibly an easy way for an author to put himself in the tradition of the great American novel; among those which are brought to mind are The Grapes of Wrath and the U.S.A. trilogy.
Loon Lake, a retreat for millionaire industrialist F.W. Bennett in the 1920s, is the central setting of the novel. Young hobo Joe turns up there, entranced by a woman seen through the windows of a private railway carriage. There too is poet Warren Penfield, Bennett's pensioner; as the novel follows Joe's path after he meets Bennett and leaves Loon Lake, so too in parallel it describes Penfield's journey there. (The mixed up chronology contributes to the experimental feeling of the novel.)
A difficult read, with even the most traditional parts of the narrative flipping between first and third person, Loon Lake is also atmospheric and interesting for a reader prepared to make the effort.
February 1, 2014
If you don't want an experimental great depression novel with multiple perspectives, stream of conscious madness and Zen koans hidden through out then don't read this book.
Your loss.
Your loss.
August 8, 2025
An engaging, eventful novel about Joseph, an eighteen year old who runs away from home in 1936. He hops on a freight train and finds himself drawn to a mysterious estate on Loon Lake in the Adirondacks. Joe had been a grocery boy. He left New Jersey, hoping to travel in California. At Loon Lake, Joe becomes involved with a wealthy tycoon, Clara Lukas, a beautiful, charismatic woman, Warren Penfield, the poet and many other characters. For a time Joe adopts the identity of F. W. Bennett, a wealthy capitalist.
The novel explores issues of ambition and identity in a country where at that time, economic hardship and social inequality were particularly prevalent.
This novel is not as easy to comprehend as most of Doctorow’s novels, especially in the first half. I particularly enjoyed the last half of the book.
Another very good E. L. Doctorow novel.
This book was first published in 1980.
The novel explores issues of ambition and identity in a country where at that time, economic hardship and social inequality were particularly prevalent.
This novel is not as easy to comprehend as most of Doctorow’s novels, especially in the first half. I particularly enjoyed the last half of the book.
Another very good E. L. Doctorow novel.
This book was first published in 1980.
March 12, 2021
Feels like Doctorow needed to undermine his fan base after some great but also popular works. I first came across Doctorow’s The March as recommended reading for a course on the Civil War. I expected authenticity, wit, grace. Well, it has authenticity.
I read other reviews saying Doctorow pays no heed to grammar. It’s really only that he avoids commas and ellipses. We know where the sentences are anyway from syntax, but you have to work harder and I found myself sounding out the sentences to figure them out. You always know the story is about the 30s but told from the 70s by the occasional interspersed lines “come with me compute with me.” I figured at the end we’d find that these are recollections of a person in an asylum. I’m glad that wasn’t the case. At the end I feel that all these split visions are somehow an authentic view of America as seen from the late 70s. But I won’t be studying the book further to make sense of it.
Joe Paterson is never an endearing figure, but he is at least more worthwhile than the other lost souls of loon lake. I had no problem staying engaged in the story - as lost as the whole narrative is, the glimpses of lives we encounter made me want to read on.
I like the idea that for the whole story to come together you have to go back to the Seattle strikes of 1919. I’m sure you could analyze the work and find out how that event fits in, and maybe someday I will. Warren Penfield felt the event was momentous, but then boarded a boat for Japan.
Apart from being attractive, the women in the story are really not developed at all. We see them through the eyes of men who can feel intimacy or lust but never both. Clara and Sandy do little more than make faces, wear clothes, and undress. Why write a story about the 30s with women as just the supporting cast? If Doctorow is imitating Joyce, he could have given us some type of Molly Bloom. Instead he removed the commas.
I’m left thinking that the author found pieces of a story to tell but didn’t bother telling the story.
I read other reviews saying Doctorow pays no heed to grammar. It’s really only that he avoids commas and ellipses. We know where the sentences are anyway from syntax, but you have to work harder and I found myself sounding out the sentences to figure them out. You always know the story is about the 30s but told from the 70s by the occasional interspersed lines “come with me compute with me.” I figured at the end we’d find that these are recollections of a person in an asylum. I’m glad that wasn’t the case. At the end I feel that all these split visions are somehow an authentic view of America as seen from the late 70s. But I won’t be studying the book further to make sense of it.
Joe Paterson is never an endearing figure, but he is at least more worthwhile than the other lost souls of loon lake. I had no problem staying engaged in the story - as lost as the whole narrative is, the glimpses of lives we encounter made me want to read on.
I like the idea that for the whole story to come together you have to go back to the Seattle strikes of 1919. I’m sure you could analyze the work and find out how that event fits in, and maybe someday I will. Warren Penfield felt the event was momentous, but then boarded a boat for Japan.
Apart from being attractive, the women in the story are really not developed at all. We see them through the eyes of men who can feel intimacy or lust but never both. Clara and Sandy do little more than make faces, wear clothes, and undress. Why write a story about the 30s with women as just the supporting cast? If Doctorow is imitating Joyce, he could have given us some type of Molly Bloom. Instead he removed the commas.
I’m left thinking that the author found pieces of a story to tell but didn’t bother telling the story.
January 4, 2024
I hate Joe of Patterson.
July 8, 2012
“A book has its origins in the private excitements of the writer’s mind,” novelist E.L. Doctorow wrote in 1994.”The excitements are private because they’re incommunicable unless they’re rendered, given extension and resolved as a book.
“Years ago," he continued, "driving in the Adirondack mountains, I passed a road sign that said ‘Loon Lake.’ I’ve always been moved by that part of the country but my strong feelings for its woods and streams suddenly intensified and seemed to cohere on those two words, which I said aloud as if they were the words of a poem.”
Doctorow's private excitement that day resulted in Loon Lake, published in 1979. Loon Lake is an odd book. It alternates between fairly straight-ahead narrative, poetry, and passages written as dossier extracts. There are also shifts in the narrative voice. Maybe all this makes Loon Lake experimental. I don't know.
In any case, it's the Depression-era story of streetkid Joe of Paterson, New Jersey. After a stint as a carney he winds up at the private estate of a wealthy industrialist, where a reclusive poet and mysterious young woman are also in residence. Lives intersect and interact, and therein, as they say, is the tale.
I really love Doctorow, and like all his other stuff Loon Lake is filled with beautiful prose, haunting and terrifying scenes, and memorable characters. The novel's experimental nature gives it a weird and dense dimension that is tough going at times.
"Of course not all, in fact very few, of the writer’s private excitements are resolved as books," Doctorow concluded in those 1994 comments. "Most are forgotten as soon as they occur."
“Years ago," he continued, "driving in the Adirondack mountains, I passed a road sign that said ‘Loon Lake.’ I’ve always been moved by that part of the country but my strong feelings for its woods and streams suddenly intensified and seemed to cohere on those two words, which I said aloud as if they were the words of a poem.”
Doctorow's private excitement that day resulted in Loon Lake, published in 1979. Loon Lake is an odd book. It alternates between fairly straight-ahead narrative, poetry, and passages written as dossier extracts. There are also shifts in the narrative voice. Maybe all this makes Loon Lake experimental. I don't know.
In any case, it's the Depression-era story of streetkid Joe of Paterson, New Jersey. After a stint as a carney he winds up at the private estate of a wealthy industrialist, where a reclusive poet and mysterious young woman are also in residence. Lives intersect and interact, and therein, as they say, is the tale.
I really love Doctorow, and like all his other stuff Loon Lake is filled with beautiful prose, haunting and terrifying scenes, and memorable characters. The novel's experimental nature gives it a weird and dense dimension that is tough going at times.
"Of course not all, in fact very few, of the writer’s private excitements are resolved as books," Doctorow concluded in those 1994 comments. "Most are forgotten as soon as they occur."
August 15, 2012
I picked this up at a book recycling stall in a shopping centre some years ago and only got round to reading it now. I had no idea who the author was or what the book would be about - there wasn't even a background blurb - which was a rather refreshing way to start reading a novel. But even if I had had expectations, I doubt I would have been disappointed.
The writing seemed effortless, which is not a given with experimental or stream-of-consciousness styles, and was generally a pleasure to read. (apart from when the content was not so pleasant, naturally, but that's rather different.) Not everything was explained and no doubt I missed some finer points and/or connections, but the book didn't need explanations or assurances of the significance of any given scene. If I have to analyze it, I'd say its method was flowing rather than making arguments.
(Plus I have a soft point for American 20th-century hopelessness.)
I was not quite sure whether the poems thrown in here and there were intended to be bad, written in the character Warren Penfield's name as they were, but either way they had their moments, and even in their less-of-a-moments managed to provide a spark and a change of pace, rather than being a mandatory bore inbetween the prose.
While writing this review, I had to change my rating from 3 to 4 stars, because I only just realized that I did "really like" this novel.
The writing seemed effortless, which is not a given with experimental or stream-of-consciousness styles, and was generally a pleasure to read. (apart from when the content was not so pleasant, naturally, but that's rather different.) Not everything was explained and no doubt I missed some finer points and/or connections, but the book didn't need explanations or assurances of the significance of any given scene. If I have to analyze it, I'd say its method was flowing rather than making arguments.
(Plus I have a soft point for American 20th-century hopelessness.)
I was not quite sure whether the poems thrown in here and there were intended to be bad, written in the character Warren Penfield's name as they were, but either way they had their moments, and even in their less-of-a-moments managed to provide a spark and a change of pace, rather than being a mandatory bore inbetween the prose.
While writing this review, I had to change my rating from 3 to 4 stars, because I only just realized that I did "really like" this novel.
January 3, 2019
This book was engaging and distinctive in its style of writing. The main characters were well defined and I was invested in learning about them. However, the distinctive part was the author’s use of timing and adding outlandish paragraphs with little to no grammar. In the beginning of the book, I was thrown off by these sections but always caught up, realized their meaning and appreciated the style. By the end of the book, I honestly had no idea what they meant. Usually I like originality but these parts at the end felt like the author had had too much to drink before writing them.
April 16, 2010
Confusing. Jumping from character to character, person to person, prose to poetry, punctuation to no punctuation. There were moments where the writing was surprising that would keep me reading, and then, disappointment. What really drove me crazy was there wasn't one redeemable character -- not one person I would want to spend any time with -- not one that seemed human.
February 10, 2015
I wish I could give it a 0. Doctorow is the king of run-on sentences and incorrect grammer. He jumps form 1st person to third person. With all the grammer errors, this book is hard to follow. There seems to be no plot as he jumps all over. I read it because it was a bookclub book. What a waste of my time.
June 29, 2015
Don't know what to say of this book. The reviews made me pick it up, but "aaaghhh". The writing is somewhat weird, and even if you get past that, the narration is confusing. Maybe I'm not made out to read this kind of book, but I'd read it again only if I have absolutely nothing to read.
March 17, 2025
What a bizarre book this was.
The characters are either the most hate-able or the most innocently unremarkable, but maybe that’s intentional. The timelines and POVs get very dicey but not entirely incomprehensible, it just takes some getting used to. The plot really goes all over the place which is both intriguing and frustratingly confusing. I mix up some of the characters because of all this. But is it good?
It’s better than its parts I’d say. As a story, it’s very unusual and intense, but as a work I’d say it’s a bit too messy to be recommended. In particular, the poetry sections and the stream of consciousness paragraphs get to be quite a pain and they really throw the novel into annoying territory. I get that Penfield is supposed to be a loser and that his poetry sucks, but man is it painful to read through even so. Even with these parts, there’s quite a lot of uncomfortable incidents that render some of the characters unlikeable to the point of questioning why I should be rooting for them at all. Also probably intentional but jeez it can get pretty unnerving.
Weird.
The characters are either the most hate-able or the most innocently unremarkable, but maybe that’s intentional. The timelines and POVs get very dicey but not entirely incomprehensible, it just takes some getting used to. The plot really goes all over the place which is both intriguing and frustratingly confusing. I mix up some of the characters because of all this. But is it good?
It’s better than its parts I’d say. As a story, it’s very unusual and intense, but as a work I’d say it’s a bit too messy to be recommended. In particular, the poetry sections and the stream of consciousness paragraphs get to be quite a pain and they really throw the novel into annoying territory. I get that Penfield is supposed to be a loser and that his poetry sucks, but man is it painful to read through even so. Even with these parts, there’s quite a lot of uncomfortable incidents that render some of the characters unlikeable to the point of questioning why I should be rooting for them at all. Also probably intentional but jeez it can get pretty unnerving.
Weird.
Read
January 21, 2022Just spent 2 weeks in california
Sunk very deep and yet remained all the time skimming some dark green-black surface
I feel strength when i think of my core and when i think of my dearest friends
Life continues on, the register keeps the score
Sunk very deep and yet remained all the time skimming some dark green-black surface
I feel strength when i think of my core and when i think of my dearest friends
Life continues on, the register keeps the score
September 22, 2025
this thing reads like an ellusive, confounding, and frequently disturbing dream, yet it still manages to come together at points in perfect bursts of prose and striking narrative parallels. getting through the more poetic passages oftentimes felt like pulling teeth, but even they never failed to grab and hold my interest for how they contributed to the bigger complicated picture of the story.
March 11, 2025
The author’s style is a little hard to understand (little punctuation, no dialogue tags, crazy long sentences, frequent unannounced time and narrator shifts, poetry!!) but it’s kinda fun?? The overall story wasn’t super interesting but the style is what made it fun
November 11, 2023
Icky but made me think. Ya know, just postmodernism stuff.
August 18, 2023
Loon Lake was E.L. Doctorow’s follow-up to Ragtime and it contained many of the features that I loved about that novel. It’s a bit different in approach though – whereas Ragtime unfolds a vast historical panorama of both real and imagined characters, Loon Lake involves a more confined trajectory. It revolves around Joe Korzienowski, born in 1918, the sole son of impoverished coal miners. When his family are expelled from their mining town for going on strike, Joe hits the road, travels from town to town and eventually ends up at Loon Lake, the palatial Adirondacks property of F.W. Bennett, the ultra-wealthy industrialist who owns the mines and town where he grew up. The novel unfolds around Joe’s interactions with Bennett, some of which occur at Loon Lake and some of which occur when he leaves.
On the surface then, Loon Lake has a tighter focus than Ragtime. Yet Doctorow offsets that with a more freewheeling writing style, shifting between a kaleidoscope of different registers. Some of the novel is written in verse, reflecting the work of Warren Penfield, the poet-in-residence at Loon Lake. The prose sections, which still comprise the majority, shift between third person omniscience, free indirect discourse, first person accounts, and undifferentiated streams of consciousness, often within the space of a single page or chapter. While the narrative proceeds more or less chronologically, it is also regularly punctuated with extreme prolepses or analepses, making it all feel like a picture that gradually comes into focus rather than a linear trajectory per se.
At one level, this feels like a classic postmodern style – pastiche, fragmentation, multiplicity. But Loon Lake is distinct in that it never quite seems to aspire to the high postmodernism of Ragtime either. Instead, the effect is as much of a residual modernism – or of a space that exists somewhere between the formal rigours of both modernist and postmodern approaches. This is true to Joe’s story, which eventually ends up stretching from the early twentieth century to the time just before Doctorow published the novel. More pervasively, however, it feels like the project of the novel is to periodise, through style, the shift from one cultural era to another, even if this can only be done through slippage, ellipsis and a continuous deferral of a stable authorial voice.
The property of Loon Lake itself plays a critical part in this process. In the scenes that take place outside the property, Doctorow largely treats American class history as a temporal phenomenon, as a process that has evolved and mutated over time. We see this quite literally in the way he relates iconic moments in class history to temporality, as in the description of the 1919 Seattle General Strike, which prompts the most free-flowing stream of consciousness in the novel, as if to evoke a cessation of industrial time as we know it. We also see it in the mechanical regulation of time, and the conflicts around it, that drive Joe’s struggles with Bennett’s broader industrial empire. Finally, we see it in the relentless onward pacing of the novel itself, quite different from the placidity of Ragtime.
At Loon Lake, however, class appears to have congealed into a function of space rather than time, in the manner more typical of postmodern literature. Here, there is no sense of the processes – temporal, procedural, industrial – that have produced Bennett’s empire; just an affirmation of them in the sheer command he exudes over the property, which Doctorow reflects in the most beautiful moments of prose and poetry in the novel. Loon Lake presents a vision of industrial capitalism distilled to post-industrial spectacle, not unlike the way in which the second film in the Godfather trilogy abstracts all the sticky, messy, multicultural labour of the first film to the glassy, simulacral continuum between Vegas and Tahoe.
Part of the brilliance of Loon Lake is that it details this extraordinary property in its first half but only fleetingly returns to it in the second half, making for a novel that is quite lopsided in terms of its aesthetic signature, although this is of course part of the broader project of inhabiting an uneven and uncomfortable space between modernist temporality and postmodern spatiality. And the spatial signature of Loon Lake does continue, mercurially, throughout the narrative in a plethora uncanny ways, especially when the third act takes us to Jacksontown, Indiana, an industrial dystopia constructed under the Bennett name that nevertheless provides occasional glimpses of the hyperspatiality of the title property – in the way Doctorow describes the junction of a street, the layout of a factory floor, or the effervescence of snow and sky.
In that sense, Loon Lake intensifies a tension that was already present within Ragtime – between sites of real historical temporality, such as New Rochelle, New York and New Jersey, and a more emergent simulacral space, which encompasses the interludes in Coney Island, the North Pole and the Pyramids at Giza. All three of these spaces evoke a capitalism that, like J.P. Morgan, one of the protagonists, longs to transcend the mere flow of time to create tableaux that are ahistorical. Indeed, in Doctorow’s vision, Morgan imagines himself as one of the supernatural entities, envisaged by the ancient Egyptians, who would return in each generation to craft a different yet identical spatial scheme as tribute to his own inherent greatness. The difference, in Loon Lake, is that this Morganesque space is both more centrifuged, in the property of Loon Lake, and even more mercurially centripeted across the vast sprawl of the United States.
For all those reasons, I found Loon Lake quite an exhilarating read, even if there are a few things that still turn me off about Doctorow’s vision – especially his depiction of women, which is often pretty unpleasant and sometimes downright creepy. I also found it an uneven read albeit in an interesting way. I loved the first half and its descriptions of Loon Lake so much that I kept yearning to return to it, which I suppose is part of the point – our attachment to extraordinary capitalist spectacles even when we know the conditions under which they were produced. Perhaps that’s why I also heard echoes of Walden here too – it’s a bit like how it would feel to read Walden if you also had a compendium of all the labour that had to go into Henry David Thoreau’s sense of sublime self-sufficiency. I’m now looking forward to rereading World’s Fair, since I sense that this later part of Doctorow’s career, post-Ragtime, is the period of his that will most appeal to me.
On the surface then, Loon Lake has a tighter focus than Ragtime. Yet Doctorow offsets that with a more freewheeling writing style, shifting between a kaleidoscope of different registers. Some of the novel is written in verse, reflecting the work of Warren Penfield, the poet-in-residence at Loon Lake. The prose sections, which still comprise the majority, shift between third person omniscience, free indirect discourse, first person accounts, and undifferentiated streams of consciousness, often within the space of a single page or chapter. While the narrative proceeds more or less chronologically, it is also regularly punctuated with extreme prolepses or analepses, making it all feel like a picture that gradually comes into focus rather than a linear trajectory per se.
At one level, this feels like a classic postmodern style – pastiche, fragmentation, multiplicity. But Loon Lake is distinct in that it never quite seems to aspire to the high postmodernism of Ragtime either. Instead, the effect is as much of a residual modernism – or of a space that exists somewhere between the formal rigours of both modernist and postmodern approaches. This is true to Joe’s story, which eventually ends up stretching from the early twentieth century to the time just before Doctorow published the novel. More pervasively, however, it feels like the project of the novel is to periodise, through style, the shift from one cultural era to another, even if this can only be done through slippage, ellipsis and a continuous deferral of a stable authorial voice.
The property of Loon Lake itself plays a critical part in this process. In the scenes that take place outside the property, Doctorow largely treats American class history as a temporal phenomenon, as a process that has evolved and mutated over time. We see this quite literally in the way he relates iconic moments in class history to temporality, as in the description of the 1919 Seattle General Strike, which prompts the most free-flowing stream of consciousness in the novel, as if to evoke a cessation of industrial time as we know it. We also see it in the mechanical regulation of time, and the conflicts around it, that drive Joe’s struggles with Bennett’s broader industrial empire. Finally, we see it in the relentless onward pacing of the novel itself, quite different from the placidity of Ragtime.
At Loon Lake, however, class appears to have congealed into a function of space rather than time, in the manner more typical of postmodern literature. Here, there is no sense of the processes – temporal, procedural, industrial – that have produced Bennett’s empire; just an affirmation of them in the sheer command he exudes over the property, which Doctorow reflects in the most beautiful moments of prose and poetry in the novel. Loon Lake presents a vision of industrial capitalism distilled to post-industrial spectacle, not unlike the way in which the second film in the Godfather trilogy abstracts all the sticky, messy, multicultural labour of the first film to the glassy, simulacral continuum between Vegas and Tahoe.
Part of the brilliance of Loon Lake is that it details this extraordinary property in its first half but only fleetingly returns to it in the second half, making for a novel that is quite lopsided in terms of its aesthetic signature, although this is of course part of the broader project of inhabiting an uneven and uncomfortable space between modernist temporality and postmodern spatiality. And the spatial signature of Loon Lake does continue, mercurially, throughout the narrative in a plethora uncanny ways, especially when the third act takes us to Jacksontown, Indiana, an industrial dystopia constructed under the Bennett name that nevertheless provides occasional glimpses of the hyperspatiality of the title property – in the way Doctorow describes the junction of a street, the layout of a factory floor, or the effervescence of snow and sky.
In that sense, Loon Lake intensifies a tension that was already present within Ragtime – between sites of real historical temporality, such as New Rochelle, New York and New Jersey, and a more emergent simulacral space, which encompasses the interludes in Coney Island, the North Pole and the Pyramids at Giza. All three of these spaces evoke a capitalism that, like J.P. Morgan, one of the protagonists, longs to transcend the mere flow of time to create tableaux that are ahistorical. Indeed, in Doctorow’s vision, Morgan imagines himself as one of the supernatural entities, envisaged by the ancient Egyptians, who would return in each generation to craft a different yet identical spatial scheme as tribute to his own inherent greatness. The difference, in Loon Lake, is that this Morganesque space is both more centrifuged, in the property of Loon Lake, and even more mercurially centripeted across the vast sprawl of the United States.
For all those reasons, I found Loon Lake quite an exhilarating read, even if there are a few things that still turn me off about Doctorow’s vision – especially his depiction of women, which is often pretty unpleasant and sometimes downright creepy. I also found it an uneven read albeit in an interesting way. I loved the first half and its descriptions of Loon Lake so much that I kept yearning to return to it, which I suppose is part of the point – our attachment to extraordinary capitalist spectacles even when we know the conditions under which they were produced. Perhaps that’s why I also heard echoes of Walden here too – it’s a bit like how it would feel to read Walden if you also had a compendium of all the labour that had to go into Henry David Thoreau’s sense of sublime self-sufficiency. I’m now looking forward to rereading World’s Fair, since I sense that this later part of Doctorow’s career, post-Ragtime, is the period of his that will most appeal to me.
March 31, 2013
At first, I was very surprised with Loon Lake because I didn´t expect it to be as much experimental as it was - good thing that I like such novels. Despite many of the not-so-positive reviews here and despite the fact that they are actually spot-on and true in some statements, I´m gonna have to go with the 5* rating anyways. Reason one: I like experimenting both in form and content, as long as it is not for the sake of the story itself (like it happened in Barthelme´s Dead Father), so this innovative approach is all right by me. Secondly, I like complicated books. Simple statement. I like solving the story as if it was a one big puzzle and like to do my own intepretations of events inside the book. I have got plenty of that from Loon Lake. Moreover, I got somewhat of a soft spot for picturesque images and unusual characters, thus I was really enjoying the circus parts and even Penfield´s stream-of-consciousness passages even though they got tiring at some point. I value experimentation really highly and if the author manages to maintain some kind of a unity and cohesiveness of his own text despite the fact that its very nature is not unified and cohesive AT ALL, it´s just another big plus. In a nutshell, so to speak, these are the reasons why I am giving it the full rating although there were some weak spots for me as well. I am, however, willing to turn a blind eye for them this time.
September 22, 2015
I'd heard that the author passed away, may he rest in peace. I was sad, and to cheer myself up I went looking for another of his books to read, having recently re-read Billy Bathgate, which I found outstanding. Alas, I didn't like this book nearly as much. If you haven't read either, skip this one and read Billy Bathgate instead.
Doctorow didn't feel bound by all of the usual rules of punctuation, layout, and sequence. I can tolerate that from so brilliant an author, but it seemed so pointless for this book. The most annoying such non-traditionality was the frequent switching of the narrator from one character to another with little or no warning. The plot went forwards and backwards in time without warning also, and there was some stream-of-consciousness mumbo-jumbo thrown in. I liked the plot, although it follows a pattern in common with Billy Bathgate: a scrappy kid from the wrong side of the tracks meets a great man and a beautiful out-of-control woman his age.
Doctorow didn't feel bound by all of the usual rules of punctuation, layout, and sequence. I can tolerate that from so brilliant an author, but it seemed so pointless for this book. The most annoying such non-traditionality was the frequent switching of the narrator from one character to another with little or no warning. The plot went forwards and backwards in time without warning also, and there was some stream-of-consciousness mumbo-jumbo thrown in. I liked the plot, although it follows a pattern in common with Billy Bathgate: a scrappy kid from the wrong side of the tracks meets a great man and a beautiful out-of-control woman his age.
August 3, 2015
I read this book during a week on a Maine lake that has several resident loons. In spite of its bucolic title, the book is a scathing commentary on free-market capitalism and the complicated human motivations that hold us in its grip. There's a hallucinogenic quality to some of the passages that can make the story line and characters hard to keep hold of, but the craftsmanship suggests this was the author's intent. The main character he creates is a sort of dark and perverted version of a classic American success story, poor boy makes good, that's reminiscent of Mann's Felix Krull - and even more relevant for the times we're living in.
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