LOON LAKE shimmers in the dewy dawn, prose and poetry, beautiful words strung like a creeping vine in a jungle of Adirondack fir. But E. L. Doctorow's images evaporate in the sunlight. He tightly wraps the vine around his totem of America then chops at this wooden monument like a pecking bird. He hunts for seedy answers to those pregnant questions only poets ask. He wants to know who we are, where we have come from, what we look like to ourselves. He whirls in a magical helix around America's spine and in the end he finds that America has no spine, that the loons and the lake are a mirage, that the Appalachian Trail leads nowhere.

We are hollow, hollow as Japanese lanterns, hollow as tennis balls, hollow as black parachutes drifting through the night sky. We are money and beauty, expensive costumes, argyle sweaters and flannel knickers. We lust for the naked girl in the private railway car that streaks by on a summer night. We sniff at the air, spicing our senses with the scent of golden pine needles that drop like errant arrows to the forest floor.

We are all Sisyphus and we are all Midas, pushing a rock of gold west to California, knowing it will never cross the continental divide, knowing it will chase us down the mountain, knowing it will crush us with the weight of a shimy dime falling from the top of the Empire State.

WE, WE, we, I and you, Doctorow is all of us at once. Most of all he is Joe of Paterson, a wily scavenger escaping from the Great Depression, sleeping on box cars, eating from cans, living like a tent peg in a one-ring circus. And then one night the star of Bethlehem Steel leads him to the private game reserve of one queer millionaire, autobody magnate F. W. Bennett, drawing-room Zeus, master of Loon Lake.

His fortunes change, of course, money does that, you know, even to the best of us. Joe is the best of us and our worst, too. He is loving, coming with passion in short, artful gasps. He is cruel, rearing back, throwing pain into the wind, looking away. He is single, divorced and divorced and divorced, alone and lonely, separate, one.

Loon Lake changes Joe, scrubs him clean, wraps him in respectability as tight as the leather grip on a golf club. Glistening nature blinds him each morning and seduces him each night. The Lake is a world of dreams, of gnawing beavers, whizzing speedboats, amniotic whirlpools, fancy flights and flights of fantasy. Like Orpheus to his river, Joe eventually succumbs to The Lake. He succumbs to wealth, to fame, success and glory. He suffers only the wrenching pain of a boot strap as it pulls itself over a heel.

The loons flutter at the edge of the lake as only loons can, quiet and watchful, cautious, craning their necks and rolling their eyes at the merest hint of danger. Joe ignores the loons, they will die or disappear and he will live. He will go on the road, bear the blue yoke of America's heartland, deceive and be deceived, lose everything he has and keep everything he wants.

DOCTOROW makes Joe more than a symbol, gives him blood and flesh and a life of trudgery to fight and conquer. And he gives him a friend and a lover. The lover is Clara Lukacs, a lurid beauty with creamy skin and silky hair, a mortician's daughter and a mobster's moll who escapes with Joe from the Great Depression. They can never run far enough; the depression overwhelms them, the world closes in until the glamorous doll is no more than a housewife in Jacksontown, Indiana, and the noble free-spirit is the headlight man on the assembly line at Bennett Autobody Number Six in Jacksontown, Indiana, in the winter of 1936. The Depression clutches at them again, they need to escape, and they do.

Joe's friend is Warren Penfield, a failed poet who prints his own works, a baleful-eyed generous man, fatter than Warren Harding himself, a world-traveler, a peculiar sort of war hero, a Buddhist. Penfield twists the story; he exists in the first person at times, but these are Joe's versions of Penfield. And Doctorow dances between the future and the past. One moment Penfield is a coal miner's son from Seattle, the next he is a Caucasian gorilla probing the mysteries of Zen in a rice palace outside Tokyo. And Doctorow's prose switches just as quickly to poetry.

As if I were to say in words chosen

for their simple beauty the themes of such a novel.

To say, for instance, that Loon Lake is a

Great American Novel, or that Joe of Paterson

is a Great American Hero.

There are no heroes here, a novel about the

hollows of the Great America must be hollow.

In rings like tin, like the jingle of pennies

in a glass jar, an echo of a lost America,

refractions through a hollow prism.

This is epic English in an awkward way. Doctorow's skill nearly carries it off, but it is a charade. Like his subject, it shows more form than content: mystical images without context, crackling plot without mystery. He manipulated us with Ragtime, made us believe what we saw. In reality, Doctorow is just another Houdini, a conjurer of words.

LOON LAKE is political in an uncomfortable way. It is sexual in a strangely mechanical way. Its rhythm is charted, its course vaguely predictable, its ending a hollow punctuation to the entire novel. But its vision of America's past glows with more beauty than a lavender sunset over Loon Lake.