January 14, 2014
There
is no doubt that Joyce Carol
Oates is an adept and fluent
writer. Since publishing her first novel in 1964, she has written over 40 more,
three of them published last year. She is a rare example of a prolific author
who has managed to maintain her reputation as a serious literary novelist. As
John Updike said, if the phrase "woman of letters" existed, Oates would be the
person most entitled to it.
Set
in the upstate New York town of Carthage, her latest work details the shock that
runs through the Mayfield family when their dysfunctional 19-year-old daughter
Cressida disappears into the desolate Adirondack mountains. As the community
gathers to search for her in the wilds, evidence against Brett Kincaid,
decorated Iraq war veteran and former fiance of the disappeared's beautiful
sister, begins to grow.
We
are intermittently shown flashbacks of atrocities the young corporal witnessed
(and half-participated in) before he was "honourably discharged". His
experiences in Iraq are confused with the present in Carthage, and the brutality
of a conflict – so far from America – seems to invade the comfortable safety of
the town: "wars were monstrous, and made monsters of those who waged them".
The
plot takes bizarre and unexpected turns that – if you make it past the slightly
laboured first 200 pages – keep you absorbed until the end. What at first
appears to be a straightforward narrative, of a family torn apart by a loss
caused by a distant war, develops into an exploration of violence in a much
wider sense – psychological and emotional.
Carthage is an immensely proficient novel, with
careful and elegant prose, and interesting experiments with form. Although it is
hard to empathise with some of the characters, despite the time taken to relay
events from each individual's perspective, this doesn't prevent it from being an
intriguing and unpredictable read. Oates succeeds in portraying the complex
damage done to the fabric of a society by war – no matter how far away it
is.
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