SOURCE: "Into Troubled Waters," in Chicago Tribune Books, October 16, 1994, Section 14, pp. 1, 8.

In the review below, O'Rourke concludes that In the Lake of the Woods is "a risky, ambitious, perceptive, engaging and troubling novel, full of unresolved and unresolvable energies and powerful prose."

Tim O'Brien is one of his generation's most deservedly acclaimed authors. O'Brien's writing career has recorded both hits (Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried) and peculiar misses (Northern Lights, The Nuclear Age)—his novels set in America having alternated with, and fared less well than, books that use Vietnam as their subject.

The challenging and provocative In the Lake of the Woods follows that pattern in part. Coming after the widely praised, Vietnam-based The Things They Carried, the new novel is set in the States, but it combines both worlds—doing so with mixed but ultimately satisfying results.

The protagonist of In the Lake of...