SOURCE: "A Self-Made Man," in The New York Times Book Review, October 9, 1994, pp. 1, 33.

In the favorablereviewbelow, Klinkenborgpraises O'Brien's ambitious efforts in In the Lake of the Woods, especially his characterization of John Wade.

"What stories can do, I guess, is make things present." That's how Tim O'Brien put it in The Things They Carried, which was published in 1990 and which is one of the finest books, fact or fiction, written about the Vietnam War. I don't remember ever hearing a novelist make a more modest claim for the power of stories, at least not a novelist of Mr. O'Brien's stature. The statement itself—stories make things present—is unassuming and it is offered to the reader diffidently, as if the writer were about to deny the possibility of saying anything useful at all about stories. Perhaps it suggests the discomfort of a storyteller who has, for the moment...