Word: loon
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...LOON LAKE by E.L. Doctorow; Random House; 258 pages...
That is too bad, because the author's new novel demands some patience and cooperation from readers before its effects begin to take hold and grip. Gone is the spare, metronomic prose that made the inventive plot of Ragtime so accessible and entertaining. The written surface of Loon Lake is ruffled and choppy. Swatches of poetry are jumbled together with passages of computerese and snippets of mysteriously disembodied conversation. Narration switches suddenly from first to third person, or vice versa, and it is not always clear just who is telling what. Chronology is so scrambled that the aftereffects...
Doctorow may try to do too much in Loon Lake. When the poet Penfield reminisces about his experiences in Japan, for instance, he seems to belong in a different novel. But the author's skill at historical reconstruction, so evident in Ragtime, remains impressive here; the novel's fragments and edgy, nervous rhythms call up an age of clashing anxiety. Loon Lake tantalizes long after it is ended. As Penfield writes about the bird that gives its name to the Bennett estate, "The cry of loons once heard is not forgotten...
Doctorow is indeed playing a variation on an old theme: the American dream, set to the music of an American nightmare, the Depression. Much of the book's plot is generated by a single gathering of characters in 1936. A group of gangsters and their girlfriends travel to Loon Lake, the 30,000-acre Adirondack retreat of their host, Millionaire F.W. Bennett. The Mob runs an industrial service, which actually means spying, strikebreaking and union busting, and Bennett has been having more than a spot of trouble with the workers at his Indiana auto-body plant. workers...
Also present at Loon Lake are Bennett's wife Lucinda, a world-famous aviator, and Warren Penfield, a drunken poet whom she keeps on as a pet and confidant. And an uninvited guest arrives: a young hobo named Joe, who wanders onto Bennett's property and is nearly killed by a pack of vicious dogs. As he recuperates, a young woman employee on the estate explains his accident: "Those are wild-running, those dogs. It's the fault of the people who own them and can't feed them any more. And then they...