The Nightmare and the Dream

By Paul Gray

LOON LAKE by E.L. Doctorow; Random House; 258 pages; $11.95

Author E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975) Author E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975) was one of the cultural happenings of the past decade. The novel received largely rhapsodic reviews; its fictional use of such historical figures as Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan prompted reams of analysis. Commercial success accompanied the critical welcome. Paperback rights went for $1.9 million, a record at the time, a film deal was struck, and Ragtime became a bestseller. As the cash register continued to jingle, though, a number of literati began backing and filling from their earlier praise. If Doctorow is that good, so the argument ran, how come he is making so much money? The question is flawed, of course; the fact that many bad books sell well does not mean that all good ones are quickly remaindered. But having prospered a trifle too handsomely in the eyes of the purists, Doctorow created a skeptical, show-me audience for his next work of fiction.

That is too bad, because the author's new novel demands some patience and cooperation from readers before its effects begin to take hold and grip. Gone is the spare, metronomic prose that made the inventive plot of Ragtime so accessible and entertaining. The written surface of Loon Lake is ruffled and choppy. Swatches of poetry are jumbled together with passages of computerese and snippets of mysteriously disembodied conversation. Narration switches suddenly from first to third person, or vice versa, and it is not always clear just who is telling what. Chronology is so scrambled that the aftereffects of certain key events are described before the events occur. Such dislocations are undeniably frustrating at first, but they gradually acquire hypnotic force. Reading the book finally seems like overhearing bits of an oddly familiar tune.

Doctorow is indeed playing a variation on an old theme: the American dream, set to the music of an American nightmare, the Depression. Much of the book's plot is generated by a single gathering of characters in 1936. A group of gangsters and their girlfriends travel to Loon Lake, the 30,000-acre Adirondack retreat of their host, Millionaire F.W. Bennett. The Mob runs an industrial service, which actually means spying, strikebreaking and union busting, and Bennett has been having more than a spot of trouble with the workers at his Indiana auto-body plant. workers at his Indiana auto-body plant. The two sides make a business agreement, and the head crook generously gives his moll Clara to Bennett to sweeten the bargain.

Also present at Loon Lake are Bennett's wife Lucinda, a world-famous aviator, and Warren Penfield, a drunken poet whom she keeps on as a pet and confidant. And an uninvited guest arrives: a young hobo named Joe, who wanders onto Bennett's property and is nearly killed by a pack of vicious dogs. As he recuperates, a young woman employee on the estate explains his accident: "Those are wild-running, those dogs. It's the fault of the people who own them and can't feed them any more. And then they go off and forage and breed wild and hunt in packs."

The novel is framed by this startling juxtaposition: starving dogs amid baronial splendor. When Joe decides to help Clara escape from her involuntary servitude, he steals a 1933 Mercedes from Bennett and starts driving through a landscape of blighted hopes and lives. He fears pursuit by Bennett; he is also worried that Clara's gangster friend may want her back. The last place Bennett would look, Joe decides, is at his own auto plant. But does Joe really take a job there of his own free will, as he believes? Or have the enormous forces of wealth and crime conspired to crush him?

Joe's story calls up some eerie echoes. Imagine The Great Gatsby set a decade later, told by its ambitious hero while he was on the make. Joe survives and triumphs through a combination of luck, animal cunning and absolute recklessness. And his tutor, ironically, is the very man he robbed. Joe never forgets his first sight of F.W. Bennett: "All the intelligence I had of him, from his house and his lands and his train and his resident poets, had not prepared me for the impersonal force of him, the frightening freedom of him." The race, Joe decides, is to the feral.

Doctorow may try to do too much in Loon Lake. When the poet Penfield reminisces about his experiences in Japan, for instance, he seems to belong in a different novel. But the author's skill at historical reconstruction, so evident in Ragtime, remains impressive here; the novel's fragments and edgy, nervous rhythms call up an age of clashing anxiety. Loon Lake tantalizes long after it is ended. As Penfield writes about the bird that gives its name to the Bennett estate, "The cry of loons once heard is not forgotten."

--By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"And then, below, a broad lake came into view, a lake glittering with the last light of the day. I stopped to look at it. Something was moving, making a straight line of agitation, like a tear, in the surface.

A moment later a bird was rising slowly from the water, a bird large enough to be seen from this distance but only against the silver phosphorescence of the water. When it rose as high as the land it was gone. . .

My vantage point was from the land side, a rise in an enormous rolling meadow beside a tennis court fenced in wood and mesh. I did not try to move closer to see in detail what was in the light of the lodge windows, all ablaze everywhere, as if great crowds were inside. I knew there were no crowds. The wind amplified in gusts the strains of a dance band. When the song was over, it began again. It was a Victrola record of a tune I recognized, Exactly Like You.

The perverse effect of this music and the lighted windows was of a repellent and desolate isolation."

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