You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverbot, and welcome to Bookworm. Today my guest is

Tim O'Brien, the author most recently of the novel in the Lake of the Woods published by

Houten Mifflin. He's the author as well of the things they carry, the nuclear age, going after

Cacciato, Northern Lights,

and if I die in a combat zone, going backwards to the beginning.

Okay, well, I'm going to engage this directly.

In the Lake of the Wood seems to be a book in which two things simultaneously occurred. It's a book that wants to see both of its main characters disappear from it.

So in a certain sense, it's a book that wants to ask what is a book like that doesn't have characters,

or that asks a more mysterious question, what happens to characters after a book is over?

Not where do they go, but what is the ontology of such figures when a book disappears?

And this disappearance is being made metaphorically consonant with another disappearance, the disappearance of certain

events in Vietnam from the minds of the American public.

Absolutely.

Am I right in thinking that you have transposed this political matter into a question of aesthetics?

Yeah, that's the whole purpose of the book. You went right to the nub of it. It's a mystery novel in which one character vanishes, and for a while, it's a wife of a man, and for a while he looks for her, then he vanishes.

You know, mysteries aren't mysteries once they're solved, in my opinion.

It's no longer a mystery.

I mean, what if, for example, you know, Amelia Earhart were to crash on the studio today?

...