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24 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Challenging but extremely satisfying work., April 20, 1999
Like all Doctorow, Loon Lake tells an amazingly interesting tale with vibrant, often beautiful, sometimes brutal detail. Even though few readers will be able to relate directly to the plotline (set in pre-WWII USA), Doctorow (as usual) manages to uncover universally human feeling despite the strange adventures the story depicts. A great work, but be warned: the switching from first to third person, tense shifts, and interspersion of poetry makes this a challenging work, but well worth the effort. I give it 4 instead of 5 stars only because, while great, the book is a notch below Billy Bathgate.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One Young Man's Perilous Climb To Improbable Fortune In Depression-Era America, September 29, 2005
E.L. Doctorow's novels have taken us from the post-Civil War 1870's (The Waterworks) to the merry-go-round of early 1900's (Ragtime) and in Loon Lake, the stark world of America in the Great Depression of the 1930's, gets this author's masterful touch. This novel shows yet again how it is possible for a great writer to weave a novel out of the tiniest of circumstances. In this case, a young man from New Jersey has set off during the worst of the depression to walk the railroad tracks and seek a better life. He hears a train coming, so he steps off and is passed by a number of luxurious private railroad cars, one of which contains a beautiful, naked woman standing in front of a mirror, holding up a dress to her body. The young man elects to follow this train and winds up at Loon Lake, the vast private estate of one of the wealthiest men in the east. The young man spends some time on this estate amid the gathering of peculiar characters there-the magnet's aviatrix wife, an obese writer and would-be political assassin--and finally decides to head west. He steals a car from the billionaire who owns Loon Lake, and agrees to give a ride to a gangster's girlfriend, the woman he'd seen that night, who is trying to evade her violent criminal lover. The pair head to Indiana and settle in a factory town literally owned, brick by brick, by the industrialist whose east coast estate they'd fled. There the main character gets a job and becomes embroiled in a union versus management conflict that sets his life off in an incredible direction. The fall and rise story of the ambitious, brave-hearted young man told of in Loon Lake is little short of a metaphor for the American dream.
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11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Is Doctorow playing with our minds?, September 28, 2002
Doctorow makes Loon Lake a much more difficult read than it needs to be. He keeps changing tense on us. He keeps switching from first to third person narrative. He keeps inserting bad poetic verse. We often don't know who is speaking, sometimes even what about. Is the narrator of the moment in a dream? A drug induced state? As looney as a loon? But in the end, Doctorow sweeps us up, and when Joe Patterson, nee Korzenioski, is up against it, we feel his pain; the tension is almost unbearable. We want good things to happen to Joe and Clara...and when he looks out the police station window to see her being taken away we want to scream with him. Then we want to see good things happen to Joe and Sandy, and maybe they are, or not. Doctorow keeps us in suspense until the last two pages when it is all laid out. And it all makes sense. It is a challenging read, but I'm glad I went down this trail. It won't be my favorite Doctorow book, but it has made a lasting impression. Especially shocking was the description of the fate of fat ladies in travelling sideshows.
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