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A review by sandygx260
The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates
2.0
I never reviewed this book?
The problem I had with this book is that JCO submerged herself so brilliantly into her obsessive narrator that she alienated me as a reader. The narrator rambles more than a horny cat looking for sex.
Flashes of brilliance hid in the dense word thickets. But too many times I felt like I needed a weed whacker to get through the endless passages that read along the lines of:
"Todd looked dashing as he walked down Witherspoon Street. Bill Terhune, his great-grandfather, had come to America on a ship that was blown into the Saragasso Sea in the middle of a scorching June. While stranded, Terhune met Wanda, the third daughter of the Duchess of Marlborough, a scandalous woman who back in 1815 took on the Duke of Pooty as her lover and bore Adam, the illegitimate heir to Duke Pooty's vast fortune, which included six houses in Wiltshire, Cornwall, Derbyshire, Shropshire, Kent, and Cheshire, all grand and built by master builder Horace Nailstaff, a man whose father had worked for the Duke of Suffering when the grand gentleman had planned his pleasure palace on the coast. Nailstaff used a special nail, designed by Stephen Chester, a man who once saved the ninth Earl of Splat's second daughter from drowning in the mill pond designed by Will Wet, a..."
You get my point.
The problem I had with this book is that JCO submerged herself so brilliantly into her obsessive narrator that she alienated me as a reader. The narrator rambles more than a horny cat looking for sex.
Flashes of brilliance hid in the dense word thickets. But too many times I felt like I needed a weed whacker to get through the endless passages that read along the lines of:
"Todd looked dashing as he walked down Witherspoon Street. Bill Terhune, his great-grandfather, had come to America on a ship that was blown into the Saragasso Sea in the middle of a scorching June. While stranded, Terhune met Wanda, the third daughter of the Duchess of Marlborough, a scandalous woman who back in 1815 took on the Duke of Pooty as her lover and bore Adam, the illegitimate heir to Duke Pooty's vast fortune, which included six houses in Wiltshire, Cornwall, Derbyshire, Shropshire, Kent, and Cheshire, all grand and built by master builder Horace Nailstaff, a man whose father had worked for the Duke of Suffering when the grand gentleman had planned his pleasure palace on the coast. Nailstaff used a special nail, designed by Stephen Chester, a man who once saved the ninth Earl of Splat's second daughter from drowning in the mill pond designed by Will Wet, a..."
You get my point.