If You Hide in Mirrors There Is Nothing To See But Yourself

I'm going to start out by admitting a personal bias about this book, but more specifically the author. Being a Minnesotan, I've read Tim O'Brien's work in the past for school. I even permanently borrowed "The Things They Carried" from my English class junior year. Many of the places referenced in "In the Lake of the Woods" are places I've been, or at least driven through. The farthest north I've been is only Duluth, but I've seen the wilderness in that area and can say that O'Brien nailed the way the forest just seems to go on and appear to be the same place in different places (that might not make sense, but you must know what I'm trying to articulate). Anyways.
This book was fantastic. O'Brien knows exactly how to connect to his audience, and he writes in such a way that makes his story yours. There is a lot to talk about.
First off, the story itself. John Wade is a psychotic main character, but through the course of the book we see that it really isn't entirely his fault. Yes, he doesn't ever face his problems and makes his life into a giant magic trick, but how else could he have been? His father made him try to win people's love instead of just receive it. This generated his craving for winning people over, thus his future in politics was set in stone from the get-go. The My Lai Massacre didn't help him. The effects of a serious event such as that leaves serious psychological issues that a person can't repress without suffering from it in the future, as O'Brien points out through his evidence (more on that brilliance later). His magic tricks, starting as a way to gain love as a child, become a way to hide from his problems. Giving Wade the nickname of Sorceror while on his tour in Vietnam was brilliant, because it gave Wade more chances to win people's devotion over through a charade. In the end, Wade's entire life is made into a giant trick. He disappears, leaving us to wonder what exactly his secret was, how he did it, where he ended up.
One thing that O'Brien did in this novel that stood out to me as a fantastic rhetorical device was the use of foreshadowing and repetition. In the beginning of the novel, O'Brien drops hints about things like My Lai and Kathy's affair, but these don't even seem significant until they are further explored by the memories to come. That's all this book is, a bunch of memories. By the end of the book, these memories are our own; when O'Brien mentions the good old days when Kathy and John would lay on the porch and think of names for babies, we end up looking back and reflecting as well. O'Brien found a way to make the story OURS. Everything is past tense, everything is just a memory. He says it himself in the end, that sometimes other memories become our own over time, and this is exactly what happens in this novel. We become John and Kathy.
The Hypothesis and Evidence chapters were the most interesting and effective chapters in this novel, even more than the memories that they explored. In the Hypothesis chapters, we are given logical scenarios about what could have happened to Kathy. Each one seems 100% likely; after reading each of these chapters I believed that that was what indeed did happen. Suddenly, however, we are shown new memories and more evidence that suggests that perhaps a different thing happened. Each time is convincing, and at the end of the novel we are allowed to decide what we think happened, because, after all, it has become a part of us. We possess these memories now, and of course we choose the ending because it BECOMES us. Am I a cynical person that thinks that John murdered Kathy? Did she just leave to cool down and get some fresh air but tragically get lost? In reality, all of these happened. Each person that reads this novel chooses a different scenario, most likely inventing their own that combines more than one of the given ones. I myself believe that Kathy needed to get away from John for a while, so she decided to escape to the river and ride around, feeling freedom from her controlled life. I guarantee you didn't come to that conclusion. This inclusion in the outcome of the story, especially by making the memories become our own, forces the reader to become very intertwined with the novel. This allows for the next and best part of the novel to take its greatest effect, and that is of course the Evidence chapters.
I've never seen a book with anything like this before. I don't read much, but I've never heard of anything like it. Stating evidence and citing sources in the middle of a fiction novel? Bizarre, yet extremely effective rhetoric. O'Brien's words are never questioned, because he uses facts; it's logos at its core meaning. He uses interviews, both fictional (with the townspeople and relatives and John and Kathy) and real (with the soldiers involved in the My Lai Massacre), excerpts from classic books and letters, even the contents of John's magic kit. We are presented with the facts and allowed to connect the dots on our own. By juxtaposing an interview with one of the soldiers that killed innocent townspeople in My Lai with a quote from a British officer about doing the same thing after the battles of Lexington and Concord, we are indirectly led to the conclusion that we were no better than the imperial forces we fought in our revolution. And yet these conclusions that we are supposed to get ourselves are sometimes explained to us by O'Brien himself. In footnotes in these chapters, he sometimes responds to a quote, and every one of these outlines what he's trying to say with this book. He is directly and indirectly, at the same time, telling us his message. We get it, loud and clear. He has become an outsider just like us, an observer of the events in the novel; he shares the memories involved just as much as we do. His observations about what he went through while walking through My Lai one year after the massacre are personal, but we see through his response what he's getting at. We see that the circumstances the soldiers were in were awful, we see that anger and heat and fear can build up in a soldier.
What I'm trying to get at is that O'Brien worked us over. He made it seem like he was just presenting the facts, that he was also just observing this story. We forget that it is entirely fictional; while the events did indeed happen, it's like he describes in "The Things They Carried": whether or not a memory or story is true doesn't mean it didn't happen. His method of storytelling allows for him to say his message in his book, lining the footnotes with his conclusions about everything. Instead of leaving us with "Oh, that is what he's getting at, I'll just move on to my next train of thoughts," we read his personal outlooks on the issues and think even more. Just like a magician's audience, we were fooled by O'Brien's slight of hand.