In the Lake of the Woods

John Wade, the anti-hero of this novel, is self-serving and mentally disturbed, but also good looking, intelligent, and immensely charming. John assumes many identities in the course of his life: magician, Sorcerer, son, lover, husband, soldier, war criminal.

Though he is the protagonist of the novel, and the author succeeds in explaining the tortuous complications and psychology of his character in a sympathetic fashion, John Wade is in the end a pathetic, rather than heroic, character. He endured and survived great personal trauma: his father’s verbal abuse and eventual suicide; the unendurable stresses and obscenities of war in the service of his country. After all that, he returns home to marry Kathy and build a successful career as a public servant. Yet he is never a sympathetic character, the reader, along with many of the people in John’s life, withhold from him the love he so fervently craves. The Evidence chapters make clear that some people find him untrustworthy and unlikeable, because they sense Sorcerer—the trickster and manipulator—within him.

His collusion in the massacre at Thuan Yen is simply another trauma for him to hide away behind the mirrors in his mind, along with the death of his father.