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
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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