A review by ridgewaygirl
A Book of American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oates

4.0

Because he'd seen, and not forgotten.

Because there is so little we can do. Yet it is our duty, to do it.

Because he had not lost faith and because I am hoping to learn what faith is.

So [[Joyce Carol Oates]] has written a big, meaty novel about abortion. [A Book of American Martyrs] isn't what I had expected it to be, but does JCO ever cater to expectations? Here JCO tells the story of two men, and then of two families and finishes by focusing on the daughters of the two men.

Gus Voorhees is a public health doctor working in women's clinics, vocal and visible enough to have worked his way onto the ten most wanted lists of the more radical right-to-life groups. Luther Dunphy is a carpenter who attends a fundamentalist church and who had once had dreams of becoming a minister himself. He's active in the right-to-life movement, often joining with those protesting at the clinic in his small Ohio city. The novel opens with Dunphy firing his shotgun, first at Voorhees and then at the clinic escort who had arrived at the clinic with the doctor.

Oates then goes back and forth in time, showing the lives of both families before and after the murder. The trial forms the backbone of the book. But Oates's attention is less on abortion than on how the sudden removal of the father from a family can destroy it, and on mothers who are unable, for different reasons, to be mothers and what that does to children. Oates's writing style keeps the reader at a short distance from her characters and thank goodness for that, the book is emotionally exhausting as it is. I will call the author out for her classism, where the poor are not just lacking money, but also intelligence and curiosity. The novel might have been stronger for allowing the Dunphys to be more than they were.