Doctorow's treatment of [the scenes and characters in Loon Lake] is at once traditional, odd and dissonantly beautiful, like a chorus of the blues played by Dizzy Gillespie. (p. 285)

The last paragraph of the book, written in a kind of semi-lyric computerese, outlines the rest of Joseph Paterson Bennett's career—as soldier, as deputy assistant director of Central Intelligence, as chairman of this and trustee of that, as tycoon and, in the book's powerful concluding words, as "Master of Loon Lake." What could be more conventional, more American, than this success story, long ago perfected in its naïve form by Horatio Alger? Except that Joe's material success is a moral failure, to put it mildly. But there is more to it than that.

In this same last paragraph we learn for the first time that Joe's real surname is Korzeniowski, which was also the real surname of...