For me, Loon Lake had its moments. But the style—some of it written in a kind of computer-printout blank verse, with side trips into Zen Japan—kept getting in the way. I think Doctorow is trying for a certain kind of irony, a saturnine, perhaps even prophetic, view of both the poor and rich in America, their intertwining and colliding destinies. But the balance goes awry.

It could be that Doctorow shares too much with his hero, a certain over-respect for the super-rich; F. W. Bennett, a rather boring character, is written up as a wise and shaggy Buddha casting his spell everywhere. The plot becomes mechanistic, the characters puppets in a No play. A kind of Oriental stoicism may be part of the author's point. Philosophically, that is his right. But it robs the novel of real dramatic punch and what could have been considerable humanity. (p. 49)

There are flashes here and there, especially in Doctorow's handling of Clara, with her rouged cheeks and marcelled bleached blond hair, who emits "the fluent yowl of injustice," and in a minor but marvelous character, Sandy's husband, the industrial spy "Red James."… But the troubled brilliance that streaked across Doctorow's early novels … and that we saw in a crudely entertaining way in Ragtime is dimmed here.

In Loon Lake Doctorow probably is writing about American romanticism in most of its forms. But despite a strong skepticism directed both at Bennett and Joe at the end, he himself has fallen prey to a fairly gross aspect of that romanticism, the Howard Hughes syndrome. We love our rich a little too much; we admire their power a little too easily. Fitzgerald somehow kept the balance in Gatsby. But deep in his ever young man's heart, Doctorow, in satirizing the human loons of this crazy rich man's lake, may have been secretly moved more by the sentimental thirties movies of Capra and McCarey … than by Fitzgerald's sad and lonely search for himself on the inner shores of East Egg. (p. 50)