The Falls: A Novel
by Joyce Carol Oates
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joyce Carol OatesEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-06-10
ISBN: 0061565342
Number of pages: 512
Publisher: Ecco
Book Reviews of The Falls: A Novel
Book Review: A Big, Messy, Overcooked Stew of a Novel
Summary: 4 Stars
How can I give this novel five stars when I gave Oates' brilliant The Gravedigger's Daughter five stars? The Falls is a fine, passionate, absorbing, and dark novel but it does not rise to the intense literary level of The Gravedigger's Daughter.
The Falls is basically the story of Ariah Burnaby, nee Littrell, entwined with a fictional early "history" of the Love Canal legal wars, and with Niagara Falls always in the background and often also in the foreground. Ariah's first husband kills himself with a leap into the falls on his wedding night in an incident reminiscent of the disastrous wedding night in McEwan's On Chesil Beach. (Actually it is the other way round since The Falls was published before On Chesil Beach.)
Ariah's second husband, Dirk Burnaby, is a dashing, successful, aristocratic lawyer who has a weakness for damsels in distress. After years of happiness and the arrival of three children, Chandler, Royall, and Juliet, Dirk Burnaby falls for the Lady in Black--Nina Olshaker. The Lady in Black is in distress from the noxious chemicals of Love Canal where she lives--chemicals and polutants dumped there by the chemical companies of Niagara Falls. One of Olshaker's children has died of leukemia and the others are sick. This is all taking place long before the actual Love Canal lawsuits and disaster declarations in the late 1970s and '80s. Without giving away too much let me say that events spiral down when Dirk takes the Olshaker case and drowns in it. Ariah becomes more and more eccentric and isolated as her children mature and bloom in charming ways despite their strangulated family life.
The Falls by Oates is a fascinating and absorbing study of character and social class, and the ways and means of America in the 1950s and `60s especially as instantiated in western Upstate New York. Yes, many of the events portrayed in the novel are improbable or fantastic, but then sometimes is life weirdly surprising. The novel contains many sub-stories and suggestions and events that do not fit and are simply dropped. But, again, life is like that. This is a big, messy, overcooked stew of a novel that's over spiced (I found the few sex scenes to be particularly fulsome). The Falls sprawls and gropes and crawls to sort of a conclusion (opps, sorry for the mixed metaphor).
Oates creates a world, a possible world, with real, living characters. For me, rattling around and exploring that world was absorbing and distracting at least for the eighteen or so hours that the CD version that I listened to commuting took. BTW: The reader, Anna Fields, cannot do a Jewish accent.
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