Hear a conversation with National Book Review winner Joyce Carol Oates on her new novel 'The Falls' and her luminous writing career. Oates juxtaposes the beauty, power and ferocity of Niagara Falls with the fragile relationships that come undone in her book. The novel begins with a man on his honeymoon, running past a gatekeeper, climbing a railing and throwing himself into Niagara Falls. Her latest novel, 'The Falls,' is no exception. In more than 30 novels, including national bestsellers 'We Were the Mulvaneys' and 'Blonde,' Oates has explored many faces of taboo and American family dysfunction. Her output of fiction and poetry has been enormous. She won the National Book Award in 1970 for her novel 'Them,' about a broken family in the Detroit slums. Joyce Carol Oates grew up on a farm in Lockport, New York, 20 miles from Niagara Falls.

Powerful, compassionate and ruefully humorous, The Falls is another example of Oates' inexhaustible brilliance.Īrlene McKanic lives in Jamaica, New York, but has never visited Niagara Falls.Facebook Email This article is more than 18 years old.

One could say that Niagara Falls is the book's most compelling character. She knows the smells, textures and habits of both wildflowers and toxic ooze from dumpsites. Oates knows the Niagara Falls area down to its molecules: the way little rainbows come and go in the spray of the cataract, and the weird spell it casts to draw people to their ruin. Years pass before the three Burnaby children the saintly Chandler, the ironically named Royall, and the sad and vulnerable Juliet find a tentative healing. This ruffles the feathers of some local bigwigs, and the consequences of his zeal are disastrous. Bearing and raising children drain and coarsen Ariah, and the bewildered Dirk throws himself into one of the first Love Canal pollution lawsuits. They marry, have children, grow prosperous, and then, under the pressure of so much abundance, everything goes to smash. But during the wait for the whirlpool to disgorge his body, Ariah meets and falls in love with Dirk Burnaby, an idealistic young lawyer, and almost blossoms. Ariah seems to be another of Oates' nearly somnambulistic child-women, and we almost don't wonder why her equally neurasthenic husband tossed himself into the Falls. Ariah Erskine's husband jumps from Niagara Falls only hours after their likely unconsummated wedding night at a resort hotel. The Falls spans from the early '50s to the late '70s, and begins with a calamity. The Oatesian themes are all here: the terrible cost of even the smallest happiness, the degradation of being female, the deadly struggle between the powerful and the powerless. Like that memorable book, The Falls concerns the rise, fall(s) and reconstruction of a family in upstate New York. And her latest, The Falls, is her best novel since We Were the Mulvaneys. Let those who complain that Joyce Carol Oates writes too much be silent: even her bad stuff is interesting.

The falls by joyce carol oates