Adding to Joyce Carol Oates' 3 children's books, 6 YA books, 9 books of plays, 10 books of poetry, 11 books under two pseudonyms, 16 books of nonfiction, 27 books of stories, and 41 previous novels, Daddy Love
Although his transgressive fiction is very different, and always features fully developed adolescents, most of whom begin their fateful encounters willingly or ambivalently, Dennis Cooper
Booklist says:
"Oates’ daring journey through the labyrinths of criminal minds takes a fierce turn in this unflinching yet restrained tale of the sick symbiosis between an abducted child and his fiendish captor. Dinah, a white woman living in Michigan, defied her nasty mother to marry Whit, a black radio personality. They love and adore their son, Robbie, who is a smart if high-strung five-year-old when a stranger ambushes Dinah in a mall parking lot, grabs her son, and nearly kills her when she desperately runs after his van. Known as Chester Cash, a secretive itinerant preacher and craftsman, this monster calls himself Daddy Love as he conducts his gruesome regime of torture, rape, and reward, which we witness from both his and Robbie’s perspectives over the course of six grim years. For all the horror and sensationalism of her wrenching subject, Oates judiciously charts Robbie’s brutal metamorphosis and Dinah’s resilience in an urgently compelling and drastically revealing study of evil, habitual terror, and survival."
And PW says:
"At the start of this gripping psychological thriller from Oates, Dinah Whitcomb is playing the 'find our car' game with her five-year-old son, Robbie, in the parking lot of an Ypsilanti, Mich., mall when a stranger seizes the boy and runs over Dinah in his van, maiming her. Robbie is renamed Gideon by Daddy Love, his abductor, who has kidnapped several little boys through the years, killing them when they’re adolescents and 'too old' for him. The outside world knows Daddy Love as Chet Cash, a loving father, a sensitive artist, and itinerant preacher. Spanning six years, the action shifts between Gideon and Daddy Love, who’s quick to mete out cruel punishments, and Dinah and her husband, bonded by guilt in a crumbling marriage. The creep factor ramps up when the intuitive Gideon realizes that he’s not Daddy Love’s only 'son' and the fate that awaits him. This unsettling tale showcases Oates’s masterful storytelling."
JCO's 125th book, her 43rd novel, The Accursed
In 2012 I read a lot of books, all of them books I sought out on my own, after a good review, sometimes, or hearing an author on a podcast, or seeing seven people reading it in the same subway car. But one book found me. A friend sent MY SISTER, MY LOVE, by Joyce Carol Oates, the same friend who said the smartest thing about the act of buying books I’ve ever heard, which is that when we buy a book, we are also buying, however briefly, the belief that we have time to read it.
Now, MY SISTER, etc., is six hundred pages long. When the Amazon package arrived I was, at first, a little annoyed. Where would I find the time to read all that and, putting aside for a moment my friend’s thoughtfulness, what gave it permission to set up as a roadblock between me and the books I had chosen for myself? I started to read, to be polite; I had never read Joyce Carol Oates. She was the one with the glasses, the woman who couldn’t stop writing, who wrote too much, who didn’t know when to stop ( a highly sexist dismissal; if she were a man, she would be “prolific”.) And the subject! The JonBenet Ramsey murder case, forever unsolved, a flying Dutchman of cyberspace and, again, who would write, much less read, six hundred pages about that?
I would, it turned out, at the end of a year that included the publication of my own first book. As the pages went by I would think: I want to write a novel, too. Oates made me forget that I’d done just that. While I read her book I thought: a novel can do things that no other form can. And I thought, too, how a good novelist – in this case, a great one – watches the world from a bench on a hidden hill, seeing into secret rooms, into tucked-away souls, into a whole culture at once. And how, somewhere, by some miracle of the writer’s art, she discovers the possibility for forgiveness in the most horrendous of situations.
Posted by: Richard Kramer | January 15, 2013 at 07:24 PM