39 pages • 1 hour read
In the Lake of the Woods
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Chapters 19-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary: What Was Found
The search party includes nearly a hundred volunteers, search planes, and boats; they search over 600 square miles of lake and woods, but find no sign of Kathy or the boat.
John picks Pat up when she arrives. They talk, and they both agree to get a boat to go out and search tomorrow. They are uneasy but polite with one another. Pat doesn’t understand what Kathy would have been doing out on the lake in a boat by herself, since Kathy isn’t an outdoorswoman.
She confronts John about being a war criminal and tells John that Kathy was creeped out by John’s spying and secrecy. She asks him if he did something to Kathy. He says no.
That night he is drawn back to the boathouse; he knows something happened there, but he cannot remember what. He cannot imagine Kathy being strong enough to get the boat out and carry the engine to it as well. When he returns to the cabin, Pat is there watching him.
Chapter 20 Summary: Evidence
This chapter contains quotations from court martial testimony, specifically testimony from Richard Thinbill that directly implicates John in the killing of the old man with the hoe. Eleanor Wade reveals that John’s father killed himself; he hung himself in the garage. There are additional quotations from psychology books about the trauma and grief experienced by children when a parent dies, particularly the rage that they feel at being abandoned.
Chapter 21 Summary: The Nature of the Spirit
This chapter describes the aftermath of the Thuan Yen massacre and what happened after John lost the primary in 1986, moving back and forth between the two storylines.
Sorcerer and Richard Thinbill discuss the horror of the massacre: the smells, the terrible buzzing of flies, and the fact that the soldiers were told that there were no civilians in the village. Thinbill didn’t kill anyone; Sorcerer admits to killing two people.
The night John loses the primary, Kathy is elated. Tony Carbo is hired by John’s opponent to run his campaign and says good-bye to them.
Back in Vietnam, rumors begin to circulate that there were no weapons to be found in Thuan Yen and that the civilian villagers were massacred. Charlie Company is sent back to search for weapons: the whole village lies stinking under the hot sun. They tear the village apart looking for weapons, and Lieutenant Calley intimidates them all into a code of silence about the massacre. Richard Thinbill tries to convince John Wade to come forward with him and confess what happened. Under the moral pressure and the memory of the old man with the hoe and PFC Weatherby, Sorcerer breaks down, laughing, and cannot stop.
Chapter 22 Summary: Hypothesis
This chapter continues with the theory of Kathy’s trip out onto the lake in the boat. Kathy survives the night on an island and sets off the next day, heading south. Kathy imagines a conversation she had with Tony Carbo where he tries to tell her that her husband isn’t just an innocent man of the people, a do-gooder. Kathy refuses to believe him. She wants to get back to John and start over, to regain the glow that they used to have. She loves John so very much.
Chapter 23 Summary: Where They Looked
At 6:30 a.m. on the morning of September 22, Claude wakes John and Pat up. Ruth has prepared lunches for them, and they set off to search for Kathy.
They don’t find anything, and at the end of the day they gather with the other searchers to share information and sympathy. Vinnie Pearson confronts John: he calls him a mass murderer and suggests that John killed his wife. Sherriff Lux talks with Pat; everyone is polite and says they will keep searching. John fights an urge to confess what he does remember and that he doesn’t know what he did or didn’t do.
Claude, John, and Pat go out and search every morning for the next two weeks but find nothing. By October 17th only private boats remain in the search, including Claude, John, and Pat.
John asks Claude if he can have his own boat to go out in to search. Claude refuses because John would only get lost and have to be rescued himself. The weather turns colder, and it begins to snow.
The formal search is suspended. Claude learns that the police will arrive within the next day or two to tear the cabin and the grounds apart and send divers into the lake. The police believe Kathy is there somewhere. Only Claude and Ruth Rasmussen seem to believe that John had nothing to do with Kathy’s disappearance. Claude and John have a discussion in which they both admit that John is doomed either way: the cloud of Kathy’s disappearance will follow him for the rest of his life. Claude and John spend one last day searching the lake. John buys provisions of his own for the trip he plans for the next day, with or without Claude’s help.
When John wakes in the morning a boat key is lying on the cabin’s kitchen counter. He loads up the boat and heads out on to the lake to join Kathy.
Chapter 24 Summary: Hypothesis
In this theory of Kathy’s disappearance, she is out on the lake in the boat. In the aftermath of her affair with a dentist named Harmon, Kathy comes face-to-face with John’s incredible self-absorption and realizes how large the distance is between them. She comes home a day early from her secret affair, ending it before it really gets started. John doesn’t even notice. According to this theory, she takes her pills out on the lake and kills herself, giving up on her dreams for a better, more passionate or engaging life. She realizes that nothing really matters.
Chapter 19-24 Analysis
These chapters expose the rift, the secrets, and the pretenses within the marriage between Kathy and John Wade. His political ambition drives all of their personal decisions: there is never enough money for the house they want; it is never the right time for the children they want to have.
Given the fact that both of their lives are directed toward what John wants, Kathy’s elation at his political defeat seems a little off, emotionally. Clearly, she is thinking more about the possibility of having the future she wants, rather than about what her husband may have done in the past or how devastated he might be at the political loss. She is married to a war criminal, and she doesn’t want to talk about it or to know anything about that part of his life. At one point, she asks him if it’s all true and she accepts his evasive answer that it’s both true and not true.
Kathy seems thrilled that they can now buy a Victorian house and have babies. The reader must be jarred by her elation in the face of the revelation that she is married to a monster, at least according to the press and the military. With what she knows of his nightmares, the Sorcerer, and his spying, she should be more concerned for her personal safety than elated.
As John slowly accepts that Kathy is truly gone, he regains a sense of direction in his own life; he grows and finally accepts what has happened to him. His rage disappears, and he seems to mature under the influence of Claude’s friendship. Claude is the father that John never had. Perhaps Claude’s, and to a lesser extent Ruth Rasmussen’s, unconditional, nonjudgmental acceptance heals John. He finally seems to accept responsibility for the situation in which he finds himself. He doesn’t disappear behind the mirrors in his head at this point; he stays in reality.
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