Loon Lake

"They'll work at a job and not know why. They'll marry a woman and not know why. They'll go to their graves and not know why. . . . I've never understood it, but there it is. I've never understood how a man could give up his life, give it up, moment by moment, even as he lives it, give it up from the second he's born. But there it is. Bow his head. Agree. Go along. Do what everyone's doing. Let it leach away. Sign it away. Drink it away. Sleep it away."

I have so much things to say about this novel... This is insane.

First, I'll introduce you to its author, because he's worth it (the proof is that his work has been published in thirty languages!). Born in 1931, he's not dead yet, and he's been a prolific writer on a unique work: historical fiction. E.L. Doctorow thinks that America lacks of historical substance that normally gives opportunity in literature to work on as a writer (in its interpretation, reinterpretation, and invention). Among others, Doctorow wrote Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Lives of the Poets, and Welcome to Hard Times. Doctorow was at first an editor, but he left publishing in order to write.

Loon Lake was written in 1980, but situates its narrative around the Great Depression. The postmodernist novel intermixes three different genres (bildungsroman, picaresque, and proletarian) in addition to mix up poems in a nonlinear narrative switching from the first to the third point of view and between two characters. Poems are mostly notes on Warren's life, and people he encounters. What is more destabilizing is the technique of stream of consciousness that is everywhere.

"I had the uncanny feeling that he was translating what I told him into another language."

When I started reading Loon Lake, I was overwhelmed by all these layers. I checked out the reviews, and was stunned by all the bad critics. However, I keep going (I had to read it for an university class), and I forgot to sleep one night, too caught up in the story. Joe is a hobo born in a poor family, as most of the characters are (Warren, Clara, Sandy, Libby). He quits his parents to live where life brings him. At a certain point, he is attacked by savage dogs on a propriety of a millionaire where he will encounter whom he seems to think is the love of his life, Clara. However, he has to take her out of this estate, because she is the propriety of Tommy Crapo, an awful and prosperous gangster (who will return there soon), and Warren (who lives there too) is also completely in love with her.

"But how she felt was overriding importance to me, how she felt!—then and every moment after—was my foremost concern, what I lived by."

The self-conscious narrative about one or the other narrator brings me up to be skeptic about their reliability, mainly about Joe. Is he telling the whole truth or is he making it all up like he is doing with the cops?

"You are thinking this is a dream. It is no dream. It is the account in helpless linear translation of the unending love of our simultaneous but disynchrous lives."

The end is so unexpected that I cannot even put words on it. All that the reader can have expected is swept aside.

The way the novel mixes high and low art, fiction and non-fiction, literary genres, dissolving love and hate, aggressiveness and sweetness, amorality and morality (...) makes me fall in love with it, but also with E.L. Doctorow. This author is a genius! Finally, all the narrative is based on one excellent question of life: which is more important than the other: freedom or material wealth? At the beginning, Joe thinks they are incompatible. Will you be willing to hear his conclusion?

I recommend you Loon Lake if you are willing to live an extraordinary adventure of experiences with literature, if you like to be surprise, and if you want to transcend the need of a linear narrative.