BOOKS: Missing in Contemplation

Some writers are born with a theme, some acquire a theme, and some have a theme thrust upon them. But however writers come by it, their great subject provides a surge of intensity to their work that no other material can. The novels of Mona Simpson, for example, go electric as soon as she touches on the figure of a mother; Amy Tan's fiction reaches its heights the minute she turns to China. For Tim O'Brien, who deferred his admission as a graduate student at Harvard in order to serve in Vietnam, the elemental theme is his experience there as a shy and questioning infantryman. O'Brien's Going After Cacciato (winner of the National Book Award in 1979) is perhaps the finest imaginative reconstruction of that war; and his story Speaking of Courage (from The Things They Carried, 1990), the most poignant evocation of a Vietnam veteran's displacement upon returning home. In his latest novel, In the Lake of the Woods (Houghton Mifflin; 306 pages; $21.95), O'Brien turns once again to the time-released traumas of Vietnam, writing about them bravely and often brilliantly.

Lake is mostly the story of John Wade, a boyish, idealistic politician who retreats to a cottage in the Minnesota woods to recover after a humiliating election defeat. There, with Kathy, his longtime wife and college sweetheart, he looks into the mist over the lake and plays hide-and-seek with his unwanted memories. For Wade is not only an earnest man of principles, he is also a spooked vet who wakes up yelling in his sleep recalling the horrors he was part of -- and party to -- in Vietnam. Kathy is guilty of her own betrayals, and the wary husband and wife tiptoe around each other until eventually Wade is left by himself to dwell on her secrets and his own. Both of them slip through the trapdoors of their minds, down into the subterranean passageways where we all escape when we're missing not in action but in contemplation.

O'Brien's clean, incantatory prose always hovers on the edge of dream, and his specialty is that twilight zone of chimeras and fears and fantasies where nobody knows what's true and what is not. In Vietnam, of course, he locates the ultimate "spirit world," an eerie land of shadows where kids shot at phantoms, unable to tell friend from enemy, uncertain what they were fighting for. "The jungles stood dark and unyielding. The corpses gaped. The war itself was a mystery. Nobody knew what it was about, or why they were there, or who started it, or who was winning, or how it might end." Wade is an amateur magician nicknamed "Sorcerer" by his unit, and Vietnam becomes a place where he tries to make reality go away; it is a perfect training ground for the subterfuge and surveillance tricks people also use in love.