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"Amazingly gifted" was how The Times Literary Supplement recently described Joyce Carol Oates, and we would add "remarkably productive"—in 1984, not one but two of her works, the novel Mysteries of Winterthurn and a collection of stories, Last Days, were chosen by the New York Times Book Review for their list of outstanding books of the year. Soon after came the justly admired Solstice, which confirmed "the important place Joyce Carol Oates occupies in American letters as a novelist of the first rank."*
Now we have Marya, a profound and hauntingly truthful portrait of a modern woman in search o
"Amazingly gifted" was how The Times Literary Supplement recently described Joyce Carol Oates, and we would add "remarkably productive"—in 1984, not one but two of her works, the novel Mysteries of Winterthurn and a collection of stories, Last Days, were chosen by the New York Times Book Review for their list of outstanding books of the year. Soon after came the justly admired Solstice, which confirmed "the important place Joyce Carol Oates occupies in American letters as a novelist of the first rank."*
Now we have Marya, a profound and hauntingly truthful portrait of a modern woman in search of self-understanding and fulfillment. This is the most deeply personal, and perhaps the most fascinating, of Joyce Carol Oates's novels. The woman is Marya Knauer, and her life is given to us in its successive, significant stages, from earliest childhood in violence and poverty until her mid-thirties, when she is quite famous as a critic and intellectual commentator, a frequent American delegate to international conferences. At whatever stage, Marya is unforgettable, and the course of her life seems as unpredictable and, in retrospect, as inevitable as life itself.
For though Marya wants to be like "the others," by the time she has reached high school, she knows that she cannot be—too bright, her teachers tell her; singled out, her priest tells her; too smart-alecky, says the aunt who brings her up. She is by nature one of those who observe, who see and remember everything that happens to them, who see and listen to people around them, who want to participate and share in what society describes as the good life—but cannot, not quite.
High school, college, graduate school, teaching, love affairs—her life outwardly follows a conventional enough path. At the end she has become a woman to be admired, loved, and even envied. Or so she seems to others. Yet it is not unimportant that in our last glimpse of her, Marya is still seeking a clarity of vision, a new beginning. If she were a writer of fiction, one feels, she would write precisely the book we have now—for only then would she understand Marya as poignantly and powerfully as we ourselves do, reading of her in this extraordinary novel by Joyce Carol Oates.
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ISBN-10 : 0224024205 |
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