Description:
From one of the great writers of our time comes this extraordinary novel of an ordinary American family in the 1950s. The Stevicks live in Port Oriskany, and industrial city in upstate New York—father, a romantic, though a dealer in secondhand furniture; mother, a "homemaker," absorbed in her children and the Church; son, back from Korea, with dreams of political activism; oldest daughter, rushing into marriage early and starting a large family; middle daughter, in high school, glamorous, "fast," hoping to become a pop singer; youngest daughter, quiet, watchful, secretive Enid Maria, her daddy's favorite.
From one of the great writers of our time comes this extraordinary novel of an ordinary American family in the 1950s. The Stevicks live in Port Oriskany, and industrial city in upstate New York—father, a romantic, though a dealer in secondhand furniture; mother, a "homemaker," absorbed in her children and the Church; son, back from Korea, with dreams of political activism; oldest daughter, rushing into marriage early and starting a large family; middle daughter, in high school, glamorous, "fast," hoping to become a pop singer; youngest daughter, quiet, watchful, secretive Enid Maria, her daddy's favorite.
The facade the Stevicks present as a happy family confirms the respectable stereotype of what the decade wanted, or believed it wanted, a typical American family to be. But facades and stereotypes were strategies devised for living in an age notable for both its sunny pieties and nightmare anxieties.
Almost at once we realize that the Stevicks are less ordinary than they seem: beneath the respectable surface there are furies sleeping, and there are secrets not to be revealed, to be kept even from each other. Running parallel is a visible family life in its daily complications and a violent life of lies, passions, and recriminations going on just out of sight.
Especially is this true in the passion that develops between Enid Maria Stevick and her father's younger brother, Felix, a former professional boxer who narrowly missed success and is now a man with "interests" in real estate, deals, and gambling. He is the rich, successful, perhaps shady Stevick, a figure of local romance. What begins for Enid Maria and Felix as play of a kind becomes an unappeasable sexual hunger, a near-fatal obsession, lived out in fast cars, seedy motels, and breathless meetings on the dangerous edge of violence and discovery.
Their incestuous passion is in one sense timeless, transcending the immediacy of their story, but in another sense it belongs to the 1950s—that decade, both sinister and alluring, of backyard bomb shelters, rock 'n' roll, war in Korea, early marriages and fecundity, McCarthy, blacklists, and Eisenhower. Re-creating an age that worshiped conformity, You Must Remember This is an unforgettable examination of lives that violate conformity in seeking fulfillment.
Even judged by the high standards she has set in her illustrious career, Joyce Carol Oates, in You Must Remember This, has written the novel that is surely her masterpiece. Probing the divisions between the American dream and the American nightmare, between the permissible and the forbidden, she has never been more memorable, more truthful, and, as some will argue, more shocking, for she takes us, with the Stevicks, to the farthest limits of experience.
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Manufacturer: Harpercollins
ISBN-10 : 006097169X |
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