630
PARTISAN REVIEW
property.
Loon Lake
is a property. So the writer holds 'a mirror up to
nature, and we see in it two writers, each in a different relation to the
meaning of the lake as property, holding mirrors up to it. To become
the Master of Loon Lake, to write the novel
Loon Lake,
Joe K . must
embrace the prosy
mythos
of capitalism and reject the poetic
mythos
of
revolution. He does this peremptorily, the turn is from left to right,
and he never looks back, except here in
Loon Lake.
What's to choose,
we might ask. This novel is about the Great Depression, but it is
written from the disillusioned perspective of the Small Depression in
the seventies. We know what went on in the thirties. We know what
became of the thirties. Penfield can offer Joe only an embittered and
inconsequential poem,
Loon Lake,
and the project of shooting the
capitalist, Frank Bennett, dead, which constitutes, in Doctorow's
nutshell, the romantic-revolutionary heritage, whereas Bennett,
who signifies Becoming in the full Faustian sense, who loves the
angelic flier Lucinda, and has commerce with the Devil, Crapo, this
ample Bennett, this perdurable capitalist, confers the
Ding-an-sich,
Loon Lake, and all its perks.
Here, then, is the Recognition Scene in Joe's
Loon Lake.
He is
about to take the fall for the murder of the union fink, Red James.
The cops are grilling him hard. They don't buy his story, which is
essentially true. There's not enough prostitution and betrayal in it.
They make him out to be a petty thief who slept with Red James's
wife and murdered James for the insurance policy . When Joe recog–
nizes this truth, that sorry truth , he begins to sing. He gives them
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He gives them Cagney
and Bogart. He writes them into a movie . And this movie might
indeed be a version of Hammett's
Red Harvest,
for there, too , in
Hammett's "Personville," betrayal lies within betrayal, everyone
plays a double role, and capitalism presides. Joe boldly recreates
himself in this script: he is not a petty thief, he is the son of the big–
gest of thieves, Frank W. Bennett, and nothing is as it seems. He is
'free' now to write his own fiction, to make himself up as he goes
along using whatever material is available - portions of Penfield's
text, things read in the newspaper, seen in the movies, anything. He
talks himself right out of this tough spot and, after several turns of
plot, he talks himself right into Bennett's shoes. In an epiphany that
is the brightest moment in
Loon Lake,
Joe discovers that writing
is
appropriation, and in that flash he is free, and so chooses the prop–
erty over the poem: he chooses Bennett.
Largely because of the appeal of
Ragtime,
and all the news of its
