Joyce Carol Oates

Middle-aged parents, a teenage daughter, first girlfriend. What is Aiden O’Reilly doing reading a novel devoted exclusively to these themes? Is it that old cliche, the writer is revealing the universals of human nature? I don’t think so. In a work by any other writer I would give up half way. But Oates is in control of strange magic. She involves this reader in the sin of caring more about her creations, as creations, than I might about the typical real people they are based on.

The prose races, carried along not by plot devices, but by the gathering crests of people’s inner thoughts, or purely by the narrator’s revelation of what is happening, released clause by clause, insight by insight. With Oates there is no end to what insights can be won into the most ordinary turn of events.

The novel is about a family in 50’s New York State. Contemporary events make their appearance – the son is drafted to Korea and Mr Stevick gets reported to the police for appearing to know too much about Soviet Russia to a patriotic customer at his furniture shop. (Later, he invests a lot of money in building a nuclear shelter.) But mostly the story is about 15 year-old Enid, her attempted suicide and affair with her uncle. The plot goes into her uncle Felix’s life – a boxer and man of action. The sections on her brother Warren could form a separate novella, but they are if anything more interesting than the main plot. In saying that the prose style and inner thoughts are more important than the plot I might give the wrong impression that this is a “literary” novel. The cover blurbs will correct this:

Blurbs are by the Daily Telegraph, Cosmo, and Vanity Fair – but what publisher wouldn’t try to smuggle out a work of great art as a thumping good beach read?

Oates is the goddess who can alight on any life and make it glow with significance.