A wrenching delineation of the culture of poverty—and how it shapes and circumscribes character.
This extensive revision of Oates’s second novel, published in 1967 and nominated for a National Book Award, breathes new life into a precociously brilliant book that probably deserves a place among the classics of American naturalist fiction.
The triptych focuses on the life of its “white trash” protagonist Clara Walpole, born the daughter of Kentucky migrant laborers. In the opening section, “Carleton,” Clara’s overworked, embittered young father experiences his growing family’s immersion in squalor, the loss of his eternally pregnant wife Pearl, and an emotional intimacy with his “favorite” child that sends him in search of the runaway Clara, with catastrophic consequences. “Lowry” is the phlegmatic vagrant who takes Clara to upstate New York (and Oates’s subsequently familiar fictional Eden Valley), fathers her son Steven (a.k.a. Swan), and abandons her to a relationship with married agricultural entrepreneur Curt Revere, who becomes her lover and her keeper. Swan tells Clara and his own story as the kept woman rises to respectability, the violence that seethed through Carleton reasserts itself in even his timid, bookish grandson, and Clara sinks into premature stasis and senility. As her thoughtful afterword explains, Oates has, in addition to reshaping particular incidents and emphases, enhanced this already potent story by replacing its original omniscient narrative voice with accents more closely aligned with her characters’ thoughts and speech. The resulting characterizations are unusually full and rich, and the sense of an implacable brute nemesis working its way through the Walpole generations is unerringly precise. Oates excels when depicting Clara’s sensual, earthy appetitive energies, and her portrayal of the hapless Swan’s self-destructive momentum, his feeling of belonging nowhere and to no one, is almost beyond praise. The gritty, insistent prose that has recently hardened too often into mannerism, here vibrates with revelatory clarity.
A wrenching delineation of the culture of poverty—and how it shapes and circumscribes character.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-8129-6834-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
A bold attempt, nevertheless, by a gifted writer whose own future looms promisingly indeed.
A compelling protagonist and a lyrical style grounded in precise observation of the physical world: these are the hallmarks of Idaho author Doerr’s complex, ambitious first novel.
As in the stories of his highly praised debut (The Shell Collector, 2002), Doerr explores the tensions between scientific objectivity and emotional vulnerability—here in the story of David Winkler, a trained hydrologist whose understanding of predictability in natural process is unsettled by mysteries that unfold from his own nature. For David experiences prophetic dreams of mischance occurring in both humdrum and catastrophic forms. We first meet him on an airplane when, at age 59, he’s returning to the US from 25 years of self-exile and servitude in the Caribbean Grenadine Islands. Working through extended flashbacks that comprise most of the text here, Doerr patiently fills in the blanks. Growing up a scholarly, solitary youth in Anchorage, Alaska, David “dreamed” his chance meeting with the woman he would wed—then, finding her unhappily married, persuaded her to accompany him to a new life in Ohio. Fathering a daughter (Grace), then dreaming the flood in which he himself accidentally drowns her, David fled his marriage and future, booked passage on a Caribbean-bound steamer, then spent an embattled quarter-century laboring to return to obligations he had shed, meanwhile acquiring a new “family” and a second chance at happiness. About Grace possesses a seductive symbolic intensity, and abounds with gorgeous descriptions and metaphors (“The sea teething” on a coral reef; “the million distant candles of the stars”). But it’s much too long, and is significantly marred by its climactic momentum toward a reconciliation that simply isn’t very credible. Its protagonist’s loneliness, regret, and guilt are painfully palpable, and go a long way toward making this risky book work—but, in the end, aren’t enough.
A bold attempt, nevertheless, by a gifted writer whose own future looms promisingly indeed.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-6182-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This graceful story offers insights into family, friendship, and finding a way to move on after a loss.
A woman whose life has been knocked off balance by her daughter’s absence struggles to regain her equilibrium.
At first glance, Sarah would seem to have it all: a devoted husband, a Brooklyn brownstone, money, good looks (attracting attention even in her late 40s), privilege, the dregs of a successful career as a filmmaker, an agent waiting to support her next project. However, as Hershon’s novel unspools over the course of a long weekend, in which Sarah and her husband, Matthew, are violently mugged in Prospect Park and then travel upstate to reconnect with old friends—a couple named Kiki and Arman—we learn that Sarah’s life is far from perfect. Sarah and Matthew’s troubled 24-year-old daughter, Leda, has vanished from their lives; the stress caused by her yearslong absence has nearly cost Sarah her marriage (she and Matthew have reconciled after a two-year separation) and her career (she can’t write about Leda, yet neither can she write about anything else). Kiki and Arman, too, have their problems as well as a new baby daughter who stirs memories—both pleasant and painful—for Sarah. In clear, compassionate prose, Hershon (A Dual Inheritance, 2013, etc.) conjures characters readers may initially assume they know and then gently and gradually subverts those assumptions, revealing the emotions and difficulties with which these nuanced characters are grappling. Ultimately the author offers notes of hope—that the secrets and sadnesses, disappointments and distress that can damage relationships, derail pursuits, and erode lives when they are held inside and in isolation can resolve when shared; that sometimes finding a way back to one another is the best way to find a way forward.
This graceful story offers insights into family, friendship, and finding a way to move on after a loss.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-26814-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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