Faithless: Tales of Transgression

Description

In this collection of twenty-one unforgettable stories, Joyce Carol Oates explores the mysterious private lives of men and women with vivid, unsparing precision and sympathy. By turns interlocutor and interpreter, magician and realist, she dissects the psyches of ordinary people and their potential for good and evil with chilling understatement and lasting power.

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Penzler Pick, March 2001: I guess it's no secret that I regard Joyce Carol Oates as one of the great living American writers, both of mystery-crime-suspense fiction and of virtually every other form invented. I previously reviewed Blonde, which went on to be nominated for a National Book Award, and it's my joy to be able to recommend Faithless: Tales of Transgression, the stories within which are about as good as the short story gets. (Full disclosure here, with the admission that I might be a trifle prejudiced in favor of this volume. It is dedicated to Alice Turner, the former fiction editor of Playboy, and to me--largely, I reckon, because several of these stories were written especially for several anthologies of which I was the editor.)

There are 24 stories in this generous volume and while some inevitably linger longer in the memory than others, there is not a dull spot in its nearly 400 pages. The title story is a haunting tale of the disappearance of a woman as recalled by her two daughters, grown now. The ending is utterly expected but, nevertheless, comes as a shock. "The Vampire" is not at all a horror story, at least not in the sense that it involves in any way elements of the supernatural, but has a growing sense of pure terror as the reader comes to see the way in which one person can absorb all the life out of another.

In "The High School Sweetheart: A Mystery," a famous mystery writer reads a speech as he accepts the presidency of the most prestigious of all mystery organizations. The speech is delivered as a piece of fiction that appears to be a confession of a horrific crime committed during his teen years while besotted with a girl two years older than he. When the speech ends, the audience cannot imagine applauding because the story seems so true. Is it?

Once again, the incomparable Joyce Carol Oates has produced a compelling and important volume for the shelves of anyone who cares about distinguished suspense fiction. --Otto Penzler

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Customer Reviews

Dark Short Stories
This collection of short stories was surprisingly dark - well-written, but quite dark. Short stories are really not my favorite thing to read, and this was unfortunately no exception. Some of the stories were more engrossing than others - but those were frustrating, too because they left me wanting more... I guess it is the format that really disappointed me the most. I should probably stop trying out short story collections - the only one that hasn't been a disappointment was _Nocturnes_.

2009-06-01 (Chicago, IL) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Faithless
I read it but it is not Joyce C. Oates best work. It is a good one to compare an contrast with in a formum sitting.

2008-09-14 (AZ USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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spellbound
This book offers some of Oates' finest short stories. If you are an Oates fan you must purchase this book and if you want to become one you also have to buy that book.
I must confess I like her short stories best, they explore the depths of the human mind and soul leaving you wonder how you would have acted in a certain situation. The books are often too complex and she tends to lose focus but not so with her short stories. You can devour them at once or take your time and eat one at a time;-)

2007-04-12 | Al | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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There is no stopping this amazing author!
Joyce Carol Oates is one of my all-time favorite authors. Her work is amazing and with prose so beautiful that it is at times lyrical. I have loved all of her short story collections and marvel at the fact that am all the more impressed every time I pick up a new Oates book. Faithless: Tales of Transgression isn't an exception. This amazing short story collection covers a vast variety of subjects that speak to you and move you to the core. Some are dark and others are downright shocking, but they are always memorable. My favorites are "Ugly," "Physical," "Secret, Silent," "The Vampire," "A Manhattan Romance," "We Were Worried About You," and "Faithless." Here you will find stories centered on self-esteem, relationships gone awry and even murder mysteries (I should add that the story "The Vampire" isn't centered on the paranormal, but it is a quite impressive and somewhat disarming tale that ought to be read). There is something for every reader in this collection. I for one have fallen in love Oates's keen storytelling all over again. I cannot recommend Faithless enough.

2004-11-27 (MA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Bleak and bleaker
The stories are bleak and depressing and should be sold with a warning label. I came away from reading the book feeling sorry for Ms. Oates for her miserable perceptions on life.

2004-02-08 | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 1

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The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel (P.S.)

Product Details

• Notes: BUY WITH Conviction, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and servicing to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• Environment: New
• ISBN13: 9780061236839

Description

Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1936, the Schwarts immigrate to a small town in upstate New York. Here the father—a former high school teacher—is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. When local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty give rise to an unthinkable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca heads out into America. Embarking upon an extraordinary odyssey of erotic risk and ingenious self-invention, she seeks renewal, redemption, and peace—on the road to a bittersweet and distinctly “American” triumph.

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Customer Reviews

Once beauty is smashed, it can't be remade
Her father said to Rebecca that she must hide her weakness. She hated him. Niles Tignor, her husband, had brought her to Chautauqua Falls in 1956. She worked for Niagra Tubing and had a three-year old, Niles Jr. She had been the gravedigger's daughter.

The Schwart family had arrived in Milburn, New York in 1936. Jacob Schwart found a job as a caretaker at the cemetery. Jacob Schwart had the appearance of a troll. In Munich he had been a math instructor.

School was the event of Rebecca's life. Rebecca, more than the two sons, resembled her father. In 1949 she was orphaned. Rose Lutter, Rebecca's teacher, offered to pay for her parents' burial and to take her in.

After the murder-suicide, the house was razed. Miss Lutter was a scrupulous housekeeper. Rebecca was hated in school, tormented, and she fought back. She was expelled. She did not want to appeal the decision and she stayed away from the tidy house.

Rebecca went to Niagra Falls for her honeymoon. In the early years of the seeming marriage Rebecca could not bear to return to Milburn.

This is a wonderful story. These are filled-out Joyce Carol Oates characters. (Many more characters exist in the novel than are mentioned here.) The writer makes the reader care about their fate. The region of the United States she knows well is described beautifully and in detail. The afterward is noteworthy. It is poignant and surprising.

2010-09-02 (Carneys Point, NJ USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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What the heck?!
I listened to this one and am sure I never would have made it through it in hardcopy form.

If this is typical of Oates writing, I will skip her other books.

An abusive father, an abusive husband for our main character. She has a stolen identity and POV of the book that jumps all over the place was making it quite distracting.

The ending was far less than satisfying.

2010-08-30 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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Keep reading and you will be rewarded
I ended up liking this book, at first I did not, but I picked it up a second time and really enjoyed it. The beginning is a little hard to get through, but once you get through the first 30 pages the story really picks up. It's an interesting testament to how people can change through out their lives, and live a double life. What bothered me about the book is that the main character Rebbecca/Hazel, is so un-emotional. The main character starts her life emotional but then I guess, gets it punished out of her, and she is transformed into to an un-emotional little girl then women from first her father then husband. The oppressive family life was hard to get through for me, it was so sad the way she grew up and was shaped in a way that changed her. I understood and sometimes admired the main character, but ended up not really liking her, I just wished she would FEEL something, and it seems like she never did. I guess overall the book is sad but ends good. I would recommend it. It is given 4 stars instead of 5 because of the slow beginning.

2010-08-27 (Aberdeen, NC) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Please Write Something Leaner than a Phone Book
The Gravedigger's Daughter is yet another of Oates's tomes concerning the fluidity of an American woman's identity. Rebecca Schwart, a German immigrant whose father Jacob attempts to erase his Jewish heritage while living as a gravedigger in upstate New York, grows up in a dysfunctional family grimed with poverty and suspicion. The book's account of Rebecca's life is disjointed--it begins with her at 23, encountering a mysterious man on her way home from a factory job, and then regresses to recount every bleak detail of her childhood. Her life is so bleak as to actually have less realism than you'd think: her brother is a pervert, her parents are either hateful or detached, and she has few friends or allies--at least until she marries and has a son with Niles Tignor, a mysterious criminal.
Here the book becomes tiresome. Oates, where she could use two words, prefers to use fifty or even one hundred, sprinkled throughout a text bloated from what could be three hundred pages into more than six hundred. If she had cut the repetition of inner monologue and sped the narrative, the book might've turned out shorter than a phone directory. Oates, however, seems to pride herself on all her novels being ridiculously huge. Rebecca's later life (including her very long political conversation with a lover's decrepit father) is too much to bear. Oate's endless and mostly out-of-place criticisms of Christianity are dull and pedantic as in all her previous books; they are also poorly reasoned. I won't buy another Oates book until she drops her atheist-preachiness (an oxymoron?) and writes a full-length novel less than four-hundred pages.

2010-08-09 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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Who cares???
I was disappointed with this book. There was too much jumping around in relation to what time frame, which I found confusing. I never really liked the characters. I also didn't like the correspondence at the end of the story...it left me hanging. I bought this item twice, once as a book for a relative, and for myself on my Kindle. It was a doubly bad purchase.

2010-07-12 (WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA, US) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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Them (Modern Library)

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780345484406
• Notes: BUY WITH Trust, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and utility to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• Demand: New

Description

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. As powerful and relevant today as it on its initial publication, them chronicles the tumultuous lives of a family living on the edge of ruin in the Detroit slums, from the 1930s to the 1967 race riots. Praised by The Nation for her “potent, life-gripping imagination,” Oates traces the aspirations and struggles of Loretta Wendall, a dreamy young mother who is filled with regret by the age of sixteen, and the subsequent destinies of her children, Maureen and Jules, who must fight to survive in a world of violence and danger.

Winner of the National Book Award, them is an enthralling novel about love, class, race, and the inhumanity of urban life. It is, raves The New York Times, “a superbly accomplished vision.”

Them is the third novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.

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Customer Reviews

Oh man!
This busted in half when I opened it! Wonderful novel, though. Wonderfully written novel, though. I bought a new one as to not read the busted in half one. I read all of the new one.

2010-05-29 (Sandiego) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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oates, them
The reviewers above miss a central point in this, her greatest novel. How can we give our individual lives and the society about us structure? Can we assume life has a strucutre that will make itself apparent to us in time? And what of the people who seek to destroy social order, who revel in chaos?

2009-01-25 (Barrie, Ontario) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Acute exposure of fragility beneath hard, shielding façades
Apathy is a weapon. Not speaking about their disappointments - as working class kids traditionally aren't supposed to do - made the victims of silence terribly alone and isolated. As Maureen and Jules grow up they learn to use apathy themselves as a weapon with which they can obliterate the outside world, disconnect themselves from all that makes the world ugly and incomprehensible. Alienation nearly kills the Children of Silence when they're forced to conform and to submit to performing tedious, repetitious routines in school day in, day out, taught not to imagine a different world but to accept this one, this supposedly concrete and unchangeable reality of poverty.

Apathy is a way to disconnect, to do away with an imposed reality and an excruciatingly slow moving time. They use the same weapon that once was used on them, and they begin to understand why their parents avoided intimacy and connection on an emotional level. Expressing feelings and the intimacy and connection that follows such expression makes shared dreams arise. And to share dreams is dangerous, because the world tears them down, crushes dreams and makes Maureen want to die in the powerlessness and futility of it all. The world indeed is a vampire sent to drain (1). As Jules and Maureen themselves are betrayed and see what apathy can do to the hopeful, to those who wish nothing more than to have real, authentic love, they realize they aren't innocent themselves and have no one to blame. If no one taught them to be true to a higher ideal, if they have no faith and no moral imperative to live up to, then how can they expect the ones they love not to hurt them? And, as the weapon backfires on them, they realize that they too are victims and that they have become as heartless as their parents.

As they meet apathy now, young adults, Jules searching for guidance and rescue, Maureen seeking escape and refuge in passive serfdom of middle class life going nowhere fast, they struggle to cope with the utter silence and the void of feelings. Jules refuses to make this his inescapable destiny and become as lost and broken as their parents, while Maureen denounces and runs away from the thought of her family and past. She withers in denial (2). She stares into a mirror and sees nothing staring back at her and then she knows what they have done to her and what she in turn will do to her children if she doesn't somehow break the curse.

Jules and Maureen feel the pain of not having their expectations met and know that their suffering is real but don't know how to communicate it because of their parents and their own submission to silence. And so they pray for someone to open up and be vulnerable, to bare their inmost desires and dreams. The Children of Silence scream to tear a hole in the wall separating them from truth and authenticity. They indeed wish for someone to speak the truth back to them and be everything they wished themselves to be but can't be by themselves, so they scream Come save me from the awful sound of nothing (3).

This review used lines from songs (1. Bullet with butterfly wings, 2. Disarm, 3. Quiet) written by Billy Corgan.

2008-07-20 | Zen master (London) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Realism stretched like putty
Perhaps the greatest trick which Oates performs in Them is her ability to take emotions which human beings have been examining for centuries, like love, and pull them apart, elongate them to such an extent that they are barely recognizable from their pedestrian definitions. There is an excruciating, unrelenting quality to Them, and it is found in this inscrutable ability to take the banal and make it rich, painful, grotesque. This novel of great pain laid bare is not so much an exercise in exposing human universals, but showing how distressingly small human concerns are; in the great sweep of events little people remain little, no matter how large their emotions.

2007-05-18 (Brooktondale, NY) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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The only kind of fiction that is real
As writer Joyce Carol Oates states in the introduction of her "them", this book is `the only kind of fiction that is real'. The gimmick in this book is that she tells the story as if it were reality. According to her early note, the narrative is based on some letters she received from a former student. This so-called student wasn't a good writer, but she thought her story worthy telling therefore her teacher assumed the task.

The student is Maureen Wendal, one of `them'. The narrative is about her and her mother, Loretta, and her older brother Jules. Oates follows a couple of years in the lives of these people. In their lives there are many ingredients that could turn the novel into a soap opera -- rape, love, lies, prostitution --, but this writer does not deals with the cheap prose. Her sentences are crafted, and her characters thoroughly developed, making all of them very real.

Political and historic background lend the book more relevance. The famous Detroit riots in the middle 60's are part of these lives. Oates seems to be interested in the subtle relationship between reality and fiction. She borrows `real' lives to construct fiction that has as basis real facts that change the lives of her characters.

As she points out in her introduction, nothing in the novel was exaggerated in order to increase the drama. Not matter if her work is real or not -- this is not her point, after all -- the fact is that she wrote an incredibly good book populated with fictional characters that read like real. And this is more than any reader can long for.

2006-02-19 | Alysson Oliveira (Sao Paulo-- Brazil) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Expensive People (Modern Library Paperbacks)

Product Details

• Fitness: New
• ISBN13: 9780812976540
• Notes: BUY WITH Certitude, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and amenities to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Description

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. In Expensive People, Oates takes a provocative and suspenseful look at the roiling secrets of America’s affluent suburbs. Set in the late 1960s, this first-person confession is narrated by Richard Everett, a precocious and obese boy who sees himself as a minor character in the alarming drama unfolding around him.

Fascinated by yet alienated from his attractive, self-absorbed parents and the privileged world they inhabit, Richard incisively analyzes his own mismanaged childhood, his pretentious private schooling, his “successful-executive” father, and his elusive mother. In an act of defiance and desperation, eleven-year-old Richard strikes out in a way that presages the violence of ever-younger Americans in the turbulent decades to come.

A National Book Award finalist, Expensive People is a stunning combination of social satire and gothic horror. “You cannot put this novel away after you have opened it,” said The Detroit News. “This is that kind of book–hypnotic, fascinating, and electrifying.”

Expensive People is the second novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, them, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.

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Customer Reviews

Strange, disturbing, well written
This was my first book of JCO's, and I'm tempted to read another. I liked her writing style although it is different and more disjointed that nice, neat and literary writing. You are taken into the head of a demented young man who not only thinks but writes strangely, and that's hard to wrap around, but interesting in that you can really identify, which can terrify you once you figure out the history of him.

A few reviews here say the book is predictable, although I was almost certain of the ending once I got to it, I wasn't sure it would end the way it did. I won't give anything away (I learned long ago not to read the reviews on amazon.com before I read the book, as people are wont to give away endings) but I will say this book was captivating and worth a read. Not perfect by any means, but it certainly kept my interest up and wasn't the same old story you usually read.

2010-03-17 | Stephanie T. Holcomb | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Oates Ahead of Her Time
Joyce Carol Oates writes so much that a reader of my generation can hardly catch up with what she's written in the past, much less with what she continues to produce, unless they were to choose to read her work almost exclusively. I walked into a bookstore the other day, and sure enough, she has yet another new book out! Having read Them, I decided I was going to read all of The Wonderland Books, and living in a suburban area, I thought that this would be an interesting one to take on next. Oates tells a story that to me seemed ahead of its time. In our generation, we look back on Columbine as having occurred 10 years ago, only to realize that Pearl Jam wrote Jeremy a whole 10 years before that. A student shot up a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, where I got my doctorate, just a couple years ago. While Expensive People doesn't deal with school violence, it certainly begins to chip away at the psychology of troubled youth that all too often come from affluence--not poverty. And she does it 20 years before Jeremy. This book is well worth the reader's time.

2009-10-27 | lifeandlifeonly (Crystal Lake IL) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Beautifully Tortured
I adore JCO enough to read a book like this that wanders about and somewhere just past the middle is it's own book.

It's own story is right there in the middle, it lasts about 3 pages and it might have been the book.

This is an uncomfortable book for any parent to read because we see our own flaws and indulgences, the ridiculousness of schooling and adulthood and the distance we create.

But it's beauty makes it less shocking.

A wonderful and engrossing read.

2008-05-28 | Mommy Blogger (Los Angeles, CA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Funny, Tragic A Hard Read
I am reading a lot of Joyce Carol Oates books, as I love her style, and the way she takes you into her stories. At present I am reading her set of four books written in the 60s as part of the Wonderland Quartet, her first book A Garden of Earthly Delights is magnificent and superb story. Expensive People is a trying read. The highlights of this book are the way Oates describes people with money, and how little they give back to society...a commentary which still fits the high income level suburbs in Northern California as well, the plasticity of the individuals living in these areas, with their big houses, small yards, little interest but in jogging, going to teas, country clubs, etc...She is talking not about people with old monies, but the nouveau riche, and she does this very well. Oates uses a young overweight 18 year old as her primary narrator and character, he is the neglected son...is fixated with his mother, and his oedipal alliance creates lots of trauma for him and in the end causes tragedy and loss...In a sense the book has great images, it is written exceptionally well...might be that I did not read it fast enough, it surely was not a page turner for me, like other of her novels...I would recommemd it with reservation... it is an interesting book.

2007-08-01 | picky reader (Richmond, CA) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 4

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one of the finest American novels
Darkly funny, richly allusive, Oates' satire of the upper middle class is a wonderful read. Many Nabokovian resonances.

2004-06-11 | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780060501204
• State: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Faith, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and handling to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Description

No other writer can match the impressive oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates. High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006 gathers short fiction from the acclaimed author's seminal collections and includes eleven new tales that further demonstrate the breathtaking artistry and striking originality of an incomparable talent who "has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces" (Chicago Tribune).

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Customer Reviews

Toxic Stories
I could get less than half way through the book. The stories were uniformly depressing, and in some cases felt toxic, with violence, cruelty and insanity. Maybe later in the book they got better, but I just couldn't go that far. The good news is that she is an excellent writer, with fine descriptive power, but the subject matter never varied from depressing. Read this book if you want to have a real "downer", done with style.

2009-05-16 | classic buff (Boulder, CO) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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Beautiful strangness
I bought this book having previously read, "Where are you going, Where have you Been? And more recently *BD*11 1 87 in the Atlantic, which blew me away. So I bought High Lonesome for further thrills and I am not disappointed. I really enjoyed "The Lady with the Pet Dog" This story had such subtle genius that it wheedled into my subconscious and I had to finish it by the second sitting."Fat Man My Love" is a grim and starkly original tale that takes courage to get through but it's worth it. In fact all of Oats' tales are a little risky because each character exposes our own weaknesses so well.

I did not give it a fifth star because the physical characteristics of the book, paper, cover, and the texture seems pulpy, cheap and prone to yellowing.

Other than that, an outstanding product.

2009-03-12 (St. Louis, MO USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Intriguing
I'm only about halfway through this book right now but I highly recommend it for anyone who likes Joyce Carol Oates or just a good short story. I've been a reader of hers for a few years now and it's nice to see how her writing has changed through each decade. I enjoy the stretches she takes in her stories and the risks she takes...I always seem to find a surprise at the end of everything she writes. This book definitely takes a while to get through...not a quick weekend read but enjoyable nonetheless.

2009-03-03 | pittydirl (Kansas) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Clearly a wordsmith worth her salt
This collection merely offers a peek at the tip of the iceberg that is Oates' massive talent... Despite spanning four decades, Oates tells us in the afterword that she had to leave out many of her defining works like the miniature narratives and gothic/mystery stories.

She's brilliant at crafting characters who are just short of likeable, and yet you feel drawn in enough to want to know what happens to them.

Her female protagonists especially, seem to invite some of the catastrophes that happen to them, and there's that sense of inevitable disaster even as she lays out the path leading to their destruction, either by a seemingly harmless flirtation, or vain indulgence in (unwanted?) attention.

A sense of unease underlies most of these stories, and you go away from them wishing the characters could have made better choices. But perhaps this mirrors real life and makes her stories more painfully realistic. Painting pretty pictures was never Oates' intention to begin with...

2009-01-01 (Singapore) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Read this as your introduction
If you've never read Oates- read this for your introduction. It is beautiful and the stories seem prefectly picked. I loved how you can see her progression as an author and also the different paths she's followed in her fiction. Worth it's wait in gold- an then some.

2007-06-04 | Poet and Critic (Iowa, USA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Little Bird of Heaven: A Novel

Description

Joyce Carol Oates returns with a dark, romantic, and captivating tale, set in the Great Lakes region of upstate New York—the territory of her remarkably successful New York Times bestseller The Gravedigger's Daughter.

Set in the mythical small city of Sparta, New York, this searing, vividly rendered exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late-twentieth-century America returns to the emotional and geographical terrain of acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates's previous bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger's Daughter.

When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects, her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her longtime lover, Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers' son, Aaron, and Eddy Diehl's daughter, Krista, become obsessed with each other, each believing the other's father is guilty.

Told in halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is a classic Oates novel in which the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty. By the novel's end, the fated lovers, meeting again as adults, are at last ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy of guilt, misplaced love, and redemptive yearning.

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Customer Reviews

Did not like it
This is one of the least enjoyable books I've read by Oates. It is far too slow moving and repetitive. Just not one of my favorites. I couldn't finish it.

2010-06-11 | Lisa Beyer (Lake Mary, FL) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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I Couldn't Finish This One
This novel by Oates is so unrelentingly depressing that I gave up about mid-way through. The events are told haltingly with all sorts of sentence fragments and jerky tropes by, Krista, the daughter of Eddy Diehl. Eddy is the sort of macho, uneducated, working class, physically imposing male that Oates seems to find sexually exciting. He fits that male stereotype that some women just cannot seem to resist. He's violent, unpredictable, and addicted. Hmmm! With a guy like that you never know what's next. What fun!? No.

His daughter, Krista, has the hots for him in an intense Oedipal way--or I guess you call it "the Electra Complex" when it's the daughter's compulsion for the father. And this seems to be what the novel is all about. How much Krista loves Daddy despite what a jerk he is. He tries to present himself as a victim and feels sorry for himself like so many macho men do, but it won't go with anyone but Krista. Indeed, every character in the novel struck me as an unredeemed jerk, unworthy of our attention.

The story is set in upstate New York where I live. I'm familiar with Utica, Herkimer County, Watertown, etc. where the events take place. There's a lot to be sad about in Upstate New York, but it's not nearly as bad as Oates makes it. It's not all crime, addiction, hatred, violence, and ignorance--although there is a lot of unemployment just now.

Read The Gravedigger's Daughter by Oates. (See my Amazon review.) It has the same setting, and an Eddy Diehl-type character plays a key role, but it is, unlike Little Bird of Heaven, a literary masterpiece.

It's too bad this book is such a loser. It's got a wonderful title.

2010-06-05 (Ithaca, NY USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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Disappointing Oates
I read this after seeing Oates on stage in conversation at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. She said her attempt was to portray the phenomenon of what happens when a family member is accused of a crime but subsequently never acquitted--how a cloud of disrepute continues to hang over that person within the community.

Of course Oates is a skilled storyteller. But what unpleasant characters; not a single one I'd want to meet. The book could have benefited from better editing as well.

2010-02-21 (Northern California) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 2

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Slow Reading
Although I consider myself to be a major fan of JCO, this book was very hard to get into. Krista's story was so full of redundant details that kept leading up to a parallel set of expectations (Dad, Aaron) that never actually materialized. None of the characters ever pulled me in and, while I had some sympathy for the situation, I never felt that I could relate to any of the characters. All in all, this wasn't her best writing.

2010-02-12 | Author of Graves' Disease, A Practical Guide (Colorado) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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repetitious
I read a lot and this is the first time I have felt the need to write a review opinion. I choose this book because of the great ratings from previous readers. The story sounded interesting. But this was not the case. I am very surprised it got such good reviews from others. There was so much unnecessary repetition. As a reader you have to reread the same statements and feelings over and over. The conclusion was not all that great either. I would not recommend this book

2010-01-11 | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 1

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