Tim O'Brien has done it again --In The Lake of the Woods proves that O'Brien is still our greatest writer of Vietnam fiction.

In his latest and most important novel, O'Brien explores the human mind's magical ability to make nightmares disappear. His theme is that each person has their own personal truth buried deep within their self, magically hidden.

O'Brien casts his own bloody nightmares of wartime atrocities and numbing psychosis through John Wade, a Vietnam vet struggling to keep hold of his sanity and marriage. Tim O'Brien is undoubtedly John Wade.

As with all of O'Brien's novels, the bloody realism of Vietnam is intertwined with feelings of love, rage, guilt and hate. But his Vietnam fiction is not just another war story. Through his obsessively meticulous description of the war and the feelings and emotions of a soldier, O'Brien captures the complete emotional storm of a foot soldier.

O'Brien, a writer who has himself struggled and contemplated suicide, shows that everyone covers their past, makes it disappear. In the Lake of the Woods is a masterful sequel to his own struggle with Vietnam and is an essay on the final chapter of his post-war depression.

His tool in uncovering this magical human capability is the character John Wade, nicknamed Sorcerer.

Throughout his life, Wade buries deep inside himself his feverish obsession with Vietnam and the bloody, torn flesh of his victims. He also forces his own alcoholism and the pain of a landslide defeat in the Minnesota senatorial election deep within himself.

After this defeat, Wade and his wife retreat to a northern Minnesota cottage in Lake of the Woods County. There, like the fog that rolls off the lake and surrounds them, Wade's horrific, bloody memories invade his brain.

The rest of In the Lake of the Woods is O'Brien's memories of mud, bones and the stench of death. These restless, sporadic dreams are held together with chapters titled "Evidence" and "Hypothesis."

In the "Evidence" chapters we learn of and are able to analyze Wade's personality through quotes from relatives and police, along with quotes from former President Richard Nixon, The Magician's Handbook and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others. These bits give the reader an outside look at Wade's psychosis.

"There is no tidiness. Blame it on the human heart. One way or another, it seems, we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history, locking up our lives and slipping day by day into the graying shadows. Our whereabouts are uncertain. All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond the dark there is only maybe," O'Brien writes.

O'Brien's latest fiction is his attempt to discover the secrets of his own soul, to uncover his past and move forward. Though all human minds can perform magical disappearing acts, O'Brien shows that it is important to remember the past, no matter how painful it may be.

"My own war does not belong to me. In a peculiar way, even at this very instant, the ordeal of John Wade -- the long decades of silence and lies and secrecy -- all this has a vivid, living clarity that seems far more authentic than my own faraway experience. Maybe that's what this book is for. To remind me. To give me back my vanished life."