Loon Lake by E. L. Doctorow

First published: 1980

Type of plot:Bildungsroman

Time of work: The 1930’s

Locale: New York and Indiana

Principal Characters:

• Joseph Korzeniowski, the protagonist, a young man from Paterson, New Jersey
• Warren Penfield, a poet at Loon Lake, Joe’s surrogate father
• F. W. Bennett, a wealthy industrialist with an estate at Loon Lake
• Lucinda Bennett, a famous aviatrix and wife of Bennett
• Clara Zukacs, the girlfriend of gangster Tommy Crapo, Bennett and Joe’s romantic object
• Red James, an undercover agent in an automobile assembly plant
• Sandy James, Red’s wife
• Sim Hearne, a carnival owner
• Fanny, the fat woman in the carnival, who is exploited by Sim

The Novel

In many ways, E. L. Doctorow’s Loon Lake is a Bildungsroman, a book about a young person’s adventures in moving from childhood to adulthood. After his 1918 birth in Paterson, New Jersey, the protagonist, Joseph Korzeniowski, becomes a young hoodlum alienated from his parents. He moves to New York City, where he becomes a grocery boy, but after hearing about idyllic life in California he hops on a freight train with other impoverished youths and heads west. He does not go far before he leaps from the train and finds employment at a broken-down carnival that features freaks. At the end of the summer, he discovers that Sim Hearne, the carnival’s owner, allows paying customers to gang rape Fanny, the fat woman, before she dies. Joe leaves the carnival with Hearne’s wife and a bankroll, but he throws the money away, leaves Hearne’s wife, and begins a long trek through the upstate New York woods.

As he walks through the woods, he sees a naked woman in a private railroad car. He follows the railroad tracks to the lavish Loon Lake estate of F. W. Bennett and is attacked by a pack of wild dogs. Although he escapes, he is seriously mauled. He recovers at Bennett’s estate, where he presumptuously signs the guest book as “Joe of Paterson,” the first of many identity passages in the novel. While an employee of Bennett, he meets Warren Penfield, a poet who had earlier come to Loon Lake and been similarly attacked by wild dogs. A deep bond develops between Penfield and Joe, who also is attracted to Cara Lukacs, whom gangster Tommy Crapo has given to Bennett. Both Penfield and Joe love Clara, but since Penfield knows he cannot escape with her, he aids Joe in taking Clara away in Mrs. Bennett’s Mercedes-Benz convertible. As they travel west, Joe becomes obsessed with making Clara “recognize” him as a person; this further develops Joe’s concern with identity. Joe and Clara switch cars to throw off would-be pursuers and eventually stop in Jacksontown, Indiana, where Bennett has one of his automobile assembly plants. Because there is some labor unrest, Joe gets a job on the assembly line and meets Red James, another plant employee. At first, Joe sees him as a “rube” or a “cracker” who is not very intelligent. Red ostensibly is working for the union, but after he and Joe are attacked and Red is killed, Joe comes to the belated conclusion that Red was actually a double agent working for Bennett’s company. Crapo’s thugs murder Red because he is no longer useful. When he is questioned by the police, Joe fabricates a narrative that will allow him to extricate himself from possible murder charges. He tells the police that he is Bennett’s son and challenges them to phone Bennett. As he is questioned, he sees Clara leave in a car driven by Tommy Crapo. After Joe is freed, he has Sandy, Red’s wife, collect Red’s insurance policy; he and she pack up the furniture, and he is determined to take her back to her family. However, he abandons her, as he had Mrs. Hearne, and returns instead to Loon Lake. He has seen a newspaper article about Lucinda Bennett’s death while on a flight, like Amelia Earhart’s, over the Pacific Ocean; from the photograph that accompanies the story, he learns that Penfield also has died.

When he returns to Loon Lake, he ingratiates himself with Bennett, whom he despises, and he becomes another person—one not like Penfield, whom he resembles, but one like Bennett. Half a year after leaving Indiana, Joe enrolls at Williams College; after his graduation in 1941, his name is changed to Joseph Paterson Bennett. Although his post-Loon Lake life is only provided in annotated form, readers do discover that he essentially assumes his “father’s” persona, holds the same posts, has failed marriages, has no children, and, in the last words of the novel, is “Master of Loon Lake.”

The Characters

As a Bildungsroman, Loon Lake focuses on one character, Joe Korzeniowski, who denies his parentage when he gives up his birth name and becomes Joe of Paterson. “Paterson” itself contains the words “pater,” or father, and “son,” and when Joe changes his last name to Bennett, he retains Paterson as a middle name. In his quest to become famous, to become someone, he is an archetypal figure who must enter the allegorical dark woods, endure trials, and then assume his place as the master of Loon Lake. When he leaves New York for California, he is determined to find or create a self, but he in fact becomes what he has to become. He assumes identities, impersonates people, and is torn between the two surrogate fathers, Penfield and Bennett. While Penfield claims that his life is Joe’s life, Joe chooses to become Bennett, although Joe’s role of narrator would seem to ally him with Penfield. Both Penfield (who has written three books of poetry, including one entitled Loon Lake) and Joe (who inherits those works and memories) annotate their texts. Since the fictional narrative ends with Joe’s becoming Bennett, it is tempting to see Joe’s real life, his story, ending when he becomes Bennett and his “life” is reduced to lists of posts, offices, achievements, and failed marriages. Like Bennett, he has no offspring, thereby adding to the idea that sterility is the price of Bennett-like success.

Warren Penfield is also a symbolic character, the person Joe resembles in his narrative attempt to control his story and explain his choice of identity. Joe may, like Penfield and the loon, dive deep and then emerge from the depths; but Joe, who says he wants freedom, does not take flight like the loon and Penfield. Flight, for Penfield, comes to mean death, but Joe is interested only in security. Unlike Penfield, who is a creative and complex character as well as a symbolic one, Bennett is strictly symbolic, the capitalist par excellence: “His dramatization suggests life devoted almost entirely to selfish accumulation of wealth and ritual use thereof according to established patterns of utmost class.” Sim Hearne is a cheaper version of Bennett; both exploit, and in this novel, it is the exploitation of women that is stressed.

Clara is the blonde goddess, the idealized woman that Joe seeks. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, however, he finds that the goddess has feet of clay. She is passed, like Fanny, from one man to another and is thus a commodity. Yet Penfield and Joe, as they tell their stories, desire to link her with the three child-women figures that appear in the novel. Since Clara cannot literally be a little girl, the identification reflects Joe’s determination to create his own reality.

Critical Context

In his treatment of Joe’s quest, desire for fame, and obsession with creating his own identity, Doctorow has created an updated The Great Gatsby. Loon Lake, though, is an even more cynical parody of the search for the American Dream. Loon Lake focuses not only on how the American Dream is attained but also on the negative effects, isolation, and emptiness that accompany the successful quest. Success destroys Doctorow’s protagonist. It is in his narrative experimentation, however, that Doctorow is most contemporary. The concern with metafiction—fiction about the writing of fiction— can also be found in the works of Jorge Luís Borges, Donald Barthelme, and John Barth, among others. This kind of fiction forces readers to become interpreters, creators of a narrative that blends fictional events and characters with historical ones. In that process, it is difficult to determine Doctorow’s own view of the 1930’s, for he mixes cynicism with sentimentality. Doctorow’s narrative experiments in Loon Lake are more radical than those in his earlier, more popular, and more accessible novels such as The Book of Daniel (1971) and Ragtime (1975), but readers of Loon Lake are offered a complex reading of America’s Depression years and the American Dream.

Bibliography

Barkhausen, Jochen. “The Confusing Recovery of History in E. L. Doctorow’s Loon Lake.” In E. L. Doctorow: A Democracy of Perception, edited by Herwig Friedl and Dieter Schulz. Heidelberg: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 1988. Study of the relationship between history and experimental narrative technique in the novel.

Fowler, Douglas. Understanding E. L. Doctorow. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992. Short biographical chapter followed by chapter-length analyses of Doctorow’s novels. Chapter 5 focuses on Loon Lake as Bildungsroman.

Gross, David S. “Tales of Obscene Power: Money and Culture, Modernism and History in the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow.” In E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations, edited by Richard Trenner. Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1983. Analysis of the relation of money, power, and isolation.

Harter, Carol C., and James R. Thompson. E. L. Doctorow. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Short biography, supplemented by helpful chronology of Doctorow’s life. Provides an overview and assessment of the novel. Chapter 4 examines the synchronicity in the Loon Lake narrative and the ties between Joe and his two surrogate fathers, Bennett and Penfield.

Parks, John G. E. L. Doctorow. New York: Continuum, 1991. Doctorow’s early life is discussed, followed by analyses of Doctorow’s novels. Chapter 5 focuses on the Depression-era content of the novel and Joe’s search for identity.