My complaint is not that [Loon Lake] is a bad, awful, commercial, exploitive book. Those books come labeled—we recognize them in an instant. This book is more deeply and subtly exploitive. It appears to concern itself with decades and figures of the past, with the Depression, with working conditions, labor strife, violence…. It appears by the act of imitation to want to pay respects to writers of the past: Dos Passos comes first to mind. It appears to be seeking a style: at any rate it abandons both punctuation and the formal sentence, as if, like Joyce, James, Faulkner, or Hemingway, Doctorow were seeking new range and flexibility in the language. All these devices suggest a literary intelligence and make me feel that I am in the presence of something serious.

And indeed I am, for this is a failed work of a serious man…. I recognize with compassion that behind the excessive awkwardness of this book lies the author's search for a style to suit a story he wishes to tell. One reason he has been unable to develop it is that he has told it before. This book tells again things Doctorow has told before, but nothing more mature. A writer cannot go forward by clinging wholly to his past. (p. 31)

The characters on the whole are vague and unrealized. They are sketches, not in the richly suggestive way of fine drawings, but in the incomplete way of a writer halted in his work. In place of characters Doctorow has passed to us entries as they would more or less appear in Who's Who. In the most indolent fashion Doctorow carries the life of Joe Paterson 40 years forward with a two-page Who's Who entry concluding this novel. I cannot believe it. A high school creative writing class would never stand for such a thing.

Nor does Joe make "astounding discoveries about himself," as the publicity director claims. Discovery may lie in the author's apprehension that he has no use for Joe at all. The novel begins on the word "They"—Joe's parents. Joe flees from them. We never encounter them again. However, we soon meet the poet Warren Penfield and his parents, who may be Joe and Joe's parents trying out in a new costume…. Warren Penfield is a second try at Joe, and Doctorow must have contemplated the idea of Warren as narrator, since at one point, in 13 pages of truly wretched poetry presumably composed by Warren, Doctorow (or Warren) tells the story of the novel he has tried in several ways to write.

For Doctorow the problem of viewpoint is so formidable that often (I do not mean twice or thrice but often) the pronouns shift from first to third person and back again as they do on old abandoned manuscripts. (pp. 32-3)

[Furthermore, does his headlong unpunctuation] do anything for meaning or for grace which could not be done better in English? This is disorder. Nor has the book real scenes. Nothing is pursued to its possible implications. Scenes which ought to begin with a problem and approach a resolution, and which ought to exist within the context of unified connections, actually serve only to present me with data…. In richer work—in Doctorow some day, I hope—the facts will recede and the drama will triumph: when drama is good we never miss the data. The devices of this book are pointless. (p. 33)