Wow, In the Lake of the Woods was incredible. I wasn’t that in to The Things They Carried, but I finished this in a day. With every paged I turned I tried to obtain as much information as I could about John. O’Brien was able to keep me interested by only giving a little bit of information at a time. However, in the end I formed my own hypothesis, that no matter what happened in that village in Vietnam the most obvious evidence was that John Wade had always and will always be crazy.
O’Brien spent so much time talking about John's childhood, his alcoholic father, and his obsession with magic and deception. For me, this was the reason if anything why John could have been responsible for Kath’s disappearance. Throughout the whole book, I had the feeling that I knew what everyone else was thinking, EXCEPT John. Which I figured was like he didn’t have a conscious and that the mirrors in his head just reflected the lies he told and never really processed them. The most telling of John’s character was the stalking. No sound-minded person would spend his or her whole day stalking and spying on someone. It was also really interesting to see the “evidence” of what other people thought about him. Because on one end you have Kath who totally adores him along with the small amount of public when he was in office that he was able to persuade. But other than that people got a weird vibe from him.
I really liked how O’Brien not only used the typical evidence such as pictures and interviews, but also how he used excerpts from politician’s biographies and magic books. He tied them into what the previous interviewer had said which made you think about the true meaning of the interview and gave it a deeper meaning. This to me was a form of logos, or logical explanations for why he was so disturbed.
I would like to have thought that they ran off together in the end and that was the real hypothesis. However, to be his insanity was so obvious it was hard to ignore or dispel.
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