The Backlist: Revisiting Tim O’Brien’s ‘In the Lake of the Woods’ with Angie Kim

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As soon as you try to define a crime novel, things get complicated. Is it any novel in which a crime occurs? Is Middlemarch a crime novel? Crime and Punishment? Lolita? In the contemporary context, the problem is often solved by categorizing a novel of high quality in which a crime occurs as a “literary mystery” or “literary thriller”—terms that presuppose both a blending and a demarcation of genres that many writers are reluctant to admit exist in the first place. With definitions so hard to come by, what can we say about a novel that takes the form of a mystery but defies all the expectations of the genre?

I’m not sure I can answer that question, but I do know that there’s nobody I’d rather discuss it with than Angie Kim, author of Miracle Creek and the forthcoming Happiness Falls. I first interviewed her for another publication in 2019, after the publication of her much-admired debut. Even before we realized that we’d attended the same high school ten years apart, she was warm, enthusiastic, and clearly fascinated by the details of her craft. Angie came to a career as a novelist after working as a trial lawyer, a role that still informs her approach to reading and writing.

Recently, we sat down again to discuss Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. O’Brien, a Vietnam veteran, is probably best known for his short story collection The Things They Carried, and I hadn’t realized that he wrote anything that could be described as crime fiction before Angie suggested the novel for this column. In the Lake of the Woods tells the story of John Wade, a defeated candidate for the U.S. Senate who has retreated to the woods of northern Minnesota with his wife Kathy after a bruising loss in the primary. Over the course of the campaign, Wade’s presence at the My Lai Massacre in South Vietnam has been revealed to the public, and he has to come to terms with grievous mistakes as both soldier and husband—a process that is only made more complicated when Kathy disappears.

Spoiler alert: Angie and I quickly realized that it’s impossible to say anything substantive about the novel without revealing that Kathy’s disappearance is never solved. O’Brien presents several potential solutions, but the reader closes the book without a definitive answer. The narrator telegraphs this lack of resolution early on, and as Angie argues, it’s one of the things that makes the story so fascinating. 

Why did you choose Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods?

It’s one of these life-changing books for me—I mean literally life-changing. Sometimes I think that if it hadn’t been for this book, I might still be a lawyer today instead of a writer.

Back in 1996, there was this one month where I had three trials in a row. I loved being in the courtroom, but I was completely wiped out by the end of the month. My husband, who was not my husband then, was going to San Francisco to give a speech and he said, “Look, you’re exhausted, just come with me. You love San Francisco, and you can hang out while I work.” It was a dreary day, and I decided to go out to one of my favorite spots, at the end of the Golden Gate Park overlooking the ocean. It was a blustery day, and I tried walking on the beach but I couldn’t do it, so I sought refuge in the Cliff House, this great little restaurant which unfortunately closed during COVID. And I had this glorious day, where I ordered a bottle of wine and a fruit and cheese plate, and I read In the Lake of the Woods cover to cover.

It was just a coincidence that I happened to have that book with me that day. I think I’d heard about it from friends, or maybe it was on a list of best books of the year or something. In any case, I read the whole book sitting there and I was the only person in the entire restaurant because it was a horrible day. I’m looking at this gorgeous surf, the beach and the rocks out in the water, and it was as idyllic a setting as I can imagine for a reader. I was so happy in that moment, thinking about these issues in the novel and really trying to mull over what did happen and which of the hypotheses was correct. I was so interested in what happened to Kathy, and in the fact that there wasn’t an answer.

I closed the book and I thought, “What am I doing with my life? I’m so happy here, I haven’t thought about anything related to work all day.” Then when I met my boyfriend that night for dinner, I said, “I think I’m doing the wrong things. I don’t remember being this happy and this carefree in I don’t know how long. I think I’m going to leave the law.” And he was like, great. And then the next day, we got engaged. 

Since then I’ve gone back to reread the book many, many times, and whenever I do, it just inspires me. You know how sometimes you get blocked when you’re writing something, and whenever that happens to me, I always reread books that I love so I can get caught up in the sentences. With the beginning chapters of this novel, there was something about the voice and the rhythm just drew me in and, and even today, it’s one of these books that I keep by my writing desk. I love all the voices—the evidence chapters are more factual, and the footnotes are a little more confessional. No matter what I’m looking for, it has a voice that suits what I’m trying to write at that moment. I read a little bit, and then I put it down, and I can write again. It never fails. 

Those are always the most special books, where you have a connection to the whole experience of reading it.

Exactly. There are other books that are like that for me too, like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and Karen Russell’s books. But In the Lake of the Woods is always an important one for me.

The novel has been called a mystery, but in some ways, it’s a strange one. It presents us with a number of different scenarios for what happened to Kathy Wade, and never commits to any of them. What’s your reaction to this decision on the part of the author? Is it satisfying to you? The narrator suggests at the end of the novel that a definitive answer would be a cheat—do you agree?

I do agree, and think that’s one of the reasons why I love it. It’s what makes the story so thought-provoking. Then from a writer’s perspective, it’s exciting that it’s genre-defying, or even genre-exploding. I don’t think anyone would categorize Tim O’Brien as a crime writer or a mystery writer, but he wrote this book about a missing person, and there’s so much more to that than just the mystery of what happened to her. What he’s interested in is the process—discovering her missing, and then all of the investigations, and then all of the things we come to find out about what happened in their past, and especially in his past. The missing person hook is really sort of a Trojan horse. 

It’s similar to what I’ve always said about the courtroom drama in Miracle Creek. Yes, it’s important, but it’s also there to entice readers to turn the pages. That format gave me a structured way to explore various people’s lives, and I think that’s exactly what happens in In the Lake of the Woods. By virtue of the wife being missing, we get to look through the relevant aspects of their past. We need that anchor to put all those disparate facets of their past together. 

The other thing that I love about the missing person question never being resolved is that it makes you want to discuss it with other people. It made me want to call up my friends that I knew had read it or to tell other friends, “Please read this book, and then let’s have a call and talk about it.” 

Now, having said that, my own book club hated it. They didn’t like the fact that there was no answer. I was like, “No, guys, that’s the point,” but I don’t think I convinced them. 

My favorite kind of crime novel is exactly what you were describing, where it hooks us with a great plot, but then uses that as an excuse to talk about all kinds of other stuff. Have you ever had a chance to meet Tim O’Brien and tell him what the book means to you?

No, I’ve never met him. I’ve seen interviews, and of course he usually talks about The Things They Carried. I do love that piece, because again, the conceit is such a great way of unifying the story that then allows him to explore lots of different things and lots of different people.

The writer in me appreciates the fact that he takes something really simple, like a missing person mystery or the conceit of the things the soldiers carried, and it and allows him to touch on all these different subjects without the narrative ever feeling disjointed.

We’ve seen an explosion of novels in the last few years that deal with some aspect of true crime. This phenomenon is usually credited to the popularity of true crime podcasts and documentaries, but do you see this novel as a precursor to that boom?

Exactly. You know, I think that maybe one of the reasons why I loved it so much at the time is because I had just gone through a trial. I loved the idea of bringing together the raw materials of an investigation—pieces of evidence and testimony and interview notes—and then requiring the reader to do a little bit of work in pulling it all together and figuring out how they might be relevant. To me that’s so much more interesting than having some investigator go through stuff and telling us what he found. Rebecca Makkai’s new book, I Have Some Questions For You, is based around a true crime podcast, and it’s a great contemporary example of some of the same techniques. When Serial first came out, we were all sort of like okay, they’re giving us all the information they have, and asking us to think and discuss among ourselves what we think about this evidence and what so and so said. I think that’s actually one of the things that makes true crime so fascinating—not the fact that it’s true, necessarily, but just that we get these raw materials and then we have to make sense of it. 

I do love a true-crime podcast where we never find out what happened. On one level, you know that was a real person, but on another, the narrative is so much like a great piece of fiction—you’re given a bit of information, and then the ending is forestalled while you try to put the pieces together. And in a way, that process of creating your own ending is probably more satisfying than the real ending would be.

Yeah, it’s exactly like that. I’m not a big true-crime junkie, but I remember thinking when Serial ended that the fact that we don’t definitively know what happened to Hae Min Lee is a huge part of the draw. In my new book that’s coming out this year, Happiness Falls, there’s a missing person at its core, and when I was writing it, I kept asking myself, What are missing person mysteries, and why do they enthrall us so much? Why are we so pulled in whenever you hear that somebody’s missing? It doesn’t matter who it is, it could be a total stranger, but you want to know what happened to them. I say in my novel that it’s one of the truest mysteries, because anything could have happened. In In the Lake of the Woods, it could be something really nefarious, like the main character killed his wife, but another hypothesis that’s almost equally plausible is that she just got lost. Another is that she ran away. There are so many possibilities and the motives behind them range from the most evil, awful stuff to the most innocuous. It’s another reason I love the fact that O’Brien leaves the ending ambiguous, because in true missing person mysteries, you do not know what happens. If you do find out what happens, that means that it’s actually turned into a different kind of crime.

At the end of the novel, we see John grappling for the first time with the idea that he might be an evil person. As the reader, we know that he may have done some of the worst things anyone can do, both at My Lai and in his personal life, but he’s also a character we’ve come to be interested in, and we have to figure out how to make sense of that.

I think that’s another reason why I love this book. Here are people who have done awful things to each other, and yet because it’s written in close third person for the most part, you have to understand them. By the end of the scene or the chapter, you’ve acquired some kind of awareness of and maybe even sympathy for why they acted the way they did.

What about the narrator? It becomes clear part of the way through that a specific person is putting together the story. We don’t know much about him, except that he’s a writer and a Vietnam vet, and he communicates with the reader mostly through footnotes. What are your thoughts on what this adds to the narrative?

The footnotes are really interesting. For a while, you assume that the close third person is just a convention, but then you realize that there’s an actual person writing down John and Kathy’s story, a writer who is fascinated by this mystery and pontificating and speculating along with us. Like the reader, he ends up asking himself what he thinks happened to Kathy Wade and what the answer says about him. If I think that John and Kathy ran away together, does that make me a naïve optimist? If I think he killed her, does that make me a cynic? He tells us where the evidence came from, which adds to that true crime feel, but he also gives us permission to experience frustration. We feel a camaraderie with this imagined writer, and then the frustration of not knowing what happened is lessened by the fact that we share that frustration with somebody else.

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