SOURCE: "Missing in Contemplation," in Time, October 24, 1994, p. 74.

In the following positive review of In the Lake of the Woods, Iyer comments on "the time-released traumas of Vietnam," which the critic marks as "the elemental theme" of O'Brien's fiction.

Some writers are born with a theme, some acquire a theme, and some have a theme thrust upon them. But however writers come by it, their great subject provides a surge of intensity to their work that no other material can. The novels of Mona Simpson, for example, go electric as soon as she touches on the figure of a mother; Amy Tan's fiction reaches its heights the minute she turns to China. For Tim O'Brien, who deferred his admission as a graduate student at Harvard in order to serve in Vietnam, the elemental theme is his experience there as a shy and questioning infantryman. O'Brien's Going After Cacciato...