[In] "Loon Lake," Mr. Doctorow has fashioned a world of mirrors, a fascinating, tantalizing novel in which nearly every image or episode has its counterpart somewhere else in the book. Even the Old-Leftish ideology, which forms a link of sorts between the earlier novels, is reflected from so many angles as to be practically dissolved.

Like "Ragtime," "Loon Lake" evokes a period in our history: in this case the 1930's…. (p. 1)

[From a plot summary] one might conclude that "Loon Lake" is a sophisticated, erratically punctuated recreation of the "proletarian" novels of the 30's. It is indeed partly that, but only in an ambiguous and fragmented way. The echoes of Dos Passos and Farrell that the reader picks up from time to time are merely momentary voices rising from a mixed choir capable of some very odd sounds. The prevailing voice of the Joe-sections is constantly interrupted by snatches of dreadful doggerel ("Come with me / Compute with me / Computerized she prints me out …), by various authorial intrusions that include skeletal biographies and other data (somewhat in the manner of "U.S.A.") and above all by long passages, often in verse, dealing with the strange saga of Warren Penfield, the poet.

Penfield's trajectory seems to move in an opposite direction from Joe's, leading as it does to the word rather than the deed, to esoteric states of consciousness rather than action…. Many pages of the novel are occupied by his loose-jointed free verse, describing the lake and its denizens and his own experiences in Japan; on the evidence, Penfield is a singularly undistinguished poet, but whether Mr. Doctorow intended him to be so is not clear.

Despite the different directions taken, Penfield seems to play the role of Joe's alter ego…. (pp. 45, 47)

In one of its aspects, "Loon Lake" is a symbolic novel of the kind once encouraged by the New Critics of the 50's. The presiding symbol is the double image of the lake—deep, glass, reflecting all that surrounds it or passes over it—and the loon, with its maniacal laughing cry, that circles above the lake, plunges into it, shattering its serenity, and then surfaces with a fish in its beak and flies off. Contemplative stasis, acquisitive action; Yin and Yang; duality contained within a cricle—the implications seem endless.

Themes proliferate to the point of self-cancellation: the son struggles against the father only to become the father; power is double-edged, both life-enhancing and deadly; the victim identifies with the oppressor; the world is beautiful and terrifying in equal measure…. There were times when this reader felt trapped in a Barthian funhouse of mirrors and longed for some graspable, salient sense of the whole to emerge.

What saves "Loon Lake" from the abstractness and aridity that often afflicts such game-playing fiction is the vivid human substance that Mr. Doctorow never loses sight of for long. If "Ragtime" is a work of brilliant surfaces, then "Loon Lake" is a work of brilliant parts. I cannot see that Mr. Doctorow has managed to impose a satisfying shapeliness upon his disparate materials; in formal terms, the new novel is certainly less successful than its two predecessors. The lake-loon, symbol is not enough: things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

Yet the novel is so rich in its disorder that I can regret only to a point the lack of a final coherence. The experience of reading "Loon Lake"—even its pages of bad poetry—was exhilarating. (p. 47)