SOURCE: "Vanishing Act," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 2, 1994, p. 3.

In the following review, Eder calls In the Lake of the Woods "an artistic botch."

The German writer Theodore Adorno questioned whether art could survive the Holocaust. The new novel by Tim O'Brien, author of Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, raises a similar question. It carries the suggestion that no human project can survive the contamination of exposure to the Vietnam War: not the political ambitions and private sanity of the veteran who is the novel's protagonist, and perhaps not even the possibility that O'Brien, who wrote so brilliantly about the war, will be able to write his way out of it.

In the Lake of the Woods tries to tell the story of John Wade, a young Minnesota politician whose promising race for the Senate is stopped dead by the revelation that he...