The mystery, alas, isn’t as intriguing as it sounds. ““Lake’’ is a pompous, impersonal book, long on authorial shenanigans and short on sympathetic characters. O’Brien devotes several chapters to long lists of ““evidence’’ – artifacts, statements from friends, quotes from Chekhov and Pynchon – that read like the notes for somebody’s doctoral thesis. He devotes several more to various ““hypotheses’’ about the night in question. And he invents a biographer who tells his own Vietnam horror stories in the footnotes. So much perspiration, so little inspiration. Even O’Brien’s ordinarily riveting prose seems forced here: ““He had wanted to be loved. And to be loved he had practiced deception. He had hidden the bad things. He had tricked up his own life. Only for love. Only to be loved.’’ Ah, those short, ominous sentences. They get annoying. After a while.
