In it Oates situates you inside the most troubled minds that she can imagine, the stream of consciousness a gusher along the lines of those elevators in The Shining. Wonderland is a brutal, transitional work, a case study of murder and madness told through squalling interiority. “ Wonderland is merely a bad, a very bad, single performance.” He was wrong in one key way: The book was no one-off. “We may expect more brilliant work from her,” Wolfe concludes. That headline was pulled from the text of Wolfe’s piece, which is often admiring of Oates. The question such pieces ask, year after year: Why does this woman believe that her splashing of blood is literature? Updike Lives to Compare Vulvae to Flowers.” But there it is, one of the earliest instances of book critics giving Oates the shaking-their-damn-heads treatment, a response best exemplified by “ Stop Me Before I Write Again,” James Wolcott’s 1982 Harper’s attack.
It’s hard to imagine so curt yet quailing a dismissal atop a Times consideration of the other major novelists of her day, something like “Mr.
This book alone places Joyce Carol Oates definitively in the company of the Great American Novelists.“Miss Oates Loves to Splash Blood On Us” sniffed the headline of Geoffrey Wolfe’s New York Times review of Joyce Carol Oates’ 1971 novel Wonderland. This novel of tremendous sweep and pace is about the American family in crisis – but also about America itself in the mid-20th century. As Ariah’s children learn that their past is enmeshed with a hushed-up scandal involving radioactive waste materials, they must confront not only their personal history but America’s murky past: the despoiling of the American landscape and the corruption and greed of the massive industrial expansion of the 1950s and 1960s.
So it all begins, in the 1950s, with the dark foreboding of the Falls as the sinister background to the tragedy.įrom this cataclysmic event unfurls a drama of parents and their children of secrets and sins of lawsuits, murder and, eventually redemption. During her vigil, an unlikely new love story begins to unfold when she meets a wealthy lawyer who is transfixed by her strange, otherworldly gaze. For two weeks, Ariah, the deserted bride, waits by the side of the roaring waterfall for news of her husband's recovered body. He's a newly-wed, and his bride has been left behind in the honeymoon suite the morning after their wedding. A tale of murder, loss and romance in the mist of Niagara Falls: it is the crowning achievement of Joyce Carol Oates’s career to date.Ī man climbs over the railings and plunges into Niagara Falls.
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