Doctorow's treatment of [the scenes and characters in Loon Lake] is at once traditional, odd and dissonantly beautiful, like a chorus of the blues played by Dizzy Gillespie. (p. 285)

The last paragraph of the book, written in a kind of semi-lyric computerese, outlines the rest of Joseph Paterson Bennett's career—as soldier, as deputy assistant director of Central Intelligence, as chairman of this and trustee of that, as tycoon and, in the book's powerful concluding words, as "Master of Loon Lake." What could be more conventional, more American, than this success story, long ago perfected in its naïve form by Horatio Alger? Except that Joe's material success is a moral failure, to put it mildly. But there is more to it than that.

In this same last paragraph we learn for the first time that Joe's real surname is Korzeniowski, which was also the real surname of the dispossessed Polish writer Joseph Conrad—and thereby hangs a moral or two. Like Conrad's major fictions, Loon Lake is narrated discontinuously, through various styles and voices, and in a shuffled chronology. But in Conrad's major novels—Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Victory—and in a number of his minor ones, the real or adoptive father undoes his son…. Conrad's point, roughly, is that the past destroys the present.

In Loon Lake, Joe of Paterson … triumphs over his adoptive father by becoming him, only worse…. It is not a matter of co-option, as young men in Joe's position often complain, but of revenge through usurpation. In America, to generalize further, the sons win; they destroy the past only to preserve the worst of it in themselves, and thereby destroy the future. Such is Doctorow's variation on the conventional American success story.

Loon Lake is not as elegantly formed as Ragtime, the standard according to which any new novel by Doctorow is bound to be judged, but it is even more ambitious, particularly in its mixture of styles and in its reach for significance. Doctorow's social conscience sometimes makes him predictable, if not ponderous, as in scenes depicting the suffering of workers in this novel…. And the stylistic variations sometimes seem footling, as in certain of Joe's run-on musings, which add nothing to the "Camera Eye" sections of Dos Passos's U.S.A., from which they derive.

For all that, Loon Lake has something throughout it that is only here and there in his four earlier novels. Beyond the assured characterizations, the adroit prose, the vivid scenes, the pointed variations on American themes, there is something still more valuable: a tone, a mood, an atmosphere, a texture, a poetry, a felt and meditated vision of how things go with us. It is more useful to a writer of fiction than a social conscience. (p. 286)