[Loon Lake] is E. L. Doctorow's first novel since Ragtime, the seventies' smash hit in American fiction. Unlike its predecessor, the new book has both a hero and a second banana…. (p. 105)

Joe [the hero] and Warren [the second banana] aren't mere symptoms or props or proofs—evidence of social injustice or American fatuity or the meaninglessness of history. And this sets them off sharply from Father, Mother, Younger Brother, J. P. Morgan, Houdini, and the others—even Coalhouse Walker—who populate the book that made Doctorow a household word.

One starts with comparisons to Ragtime because of the nature of the issues that record best seller left in its wake…. [For a while Ragtime] stimulated ecstasy in both the popular and the highbrow press….

But the second wave of attention paid the book was filled with doubt…. [Certain critics] drummed away insistently on the theme that character as traditionally understood was invisible in this writer's books. And at a crucial point in the developing discussion, Doctorow himself seemed to validate such talk by declaring his impatience with the constrictions of individual human feeling. "I want to break out," he told an interviewer, "of the little world of personal experience which has bound the novel, to escape that suffocating closeness to the characters."

Thus are Critical Issues born.

By granting its central figures a measure of independent being, Loon Lake clearly takes a step toward resolving the issues…. The storytelling in the new book shuttles between first person and third person, offering intermittently an illusion of intimacy with the characters, suggesting the sound of their voices as they converse with themselves, allowing them more than once to name their feelings….

The spirit of Satire survives in Loon Lake but now it breathes in freestanding figures close at hand, rather than in some unreachable literary manipulator of stereotypes and silhouettes. (p. 106)

Nor is the spirit of Satire and Humor the only human spirit that's alive in these pages. There's room for affection for place (the Adirondacks lake is brilliantly evoked), and emotions that are downright heartening turn up at intervals…. And while brutal passages occur …, the worst of them is lighted at least for an instant by a daringly protective human impulse…. (pp. 106-07)

[The modish affectlessness of Ragtime that vexed me is banished from some of Loon Lake] but not by any means from the whole of Loon Lake. Never for longer than a chapter at a stretch does one completely forget that this is an author who has pronounced closeness to character to be "suffocating."…

And other signs of unease with purities of feeling abound. By scrambling the narrative sequences and illogically shifting point of view, Doctorow repeatedly shatters ordinary securities of comprehension and identification. History and Great Personages of Yesteryear are less obtrusive than in Ragtime, but the author still relishes the Big Event—a mine massacre or general strike—that dwarfs the individual human presence, and he's still fond of the slotted-in, Dos Passos-like curriculum vitae that joltingly objectifies a character….

Far more consequential, Loon Lake is, like Ragtime, style-ridden from start to finish. Pages of pretentious verse succeed eruptions of Dos Passosian journalese. And the book seems absorbed in its own pell-mellness hurtling forward breathless forget pauses full stops speed limits go go go….

One advires the pace, brightness, raciness, but one notices, well before the end, an effect of homogenization: the voice of the poet Penfield shouldn't resemble so closely that of Joe of Paterson. And the homogenization of voice has as its counterpart, not surprisingly, an attempted flattening—or neutralization—of emotion itself….

In sum: the new Doctorow is good news and bad news. In Loon Lake there are openings outward toward the human that give the book a freshness—a sweetness, even—that's absent from Ragtime. But there's a stiffness—an embarrassment about attachment—that regularly edges the book away from its own emerging best self….

[Loon Lake] warrants the label—and the regard—often bestowed on first works by writers who subsequently achieve international fame as innovators. It's a novel of genuine promise. (p. 107)