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A review by alisonjfields
The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates
5.0
I come and go on Joyce Carol Oates. That's fair. She's far too prolific to hit a homerun every time. And I've long since accepted that for every one of her books I like a lot , there will be ten more that I'm (at best) indifferent to. She's ambitious and sometimes this absolutely works in her favor (I thought "Blonde" was pretty great, even if it did occasionally read like Oates had been reading Delillo). I like it when people try something weird. Even if they fail, it's usually more interesting than most of the crap out there.
That said, I have absolutely no effing idea what to make of this book. It's a post-modern Gothic Romance with a nod to the kind of "serious" name-droppy historical fiction your pretentious uncle reads on those rare occasions he deigns to read fiction at all. It's also a insanely silly sustained riff on the topic of WASP evil narrated by a racist twit obsessed with Victorian underwear and snobbery. It's terrible at moments, but I think it's quite deliberately, even ingeniously terrible. If you've ever thought: "Man, I really want to read a book about Woodrow Wilson and vampires(?) and demonic snakes and something called a 'cannibal sandwich.' I hope it also deals with ghosts and socialists and Calvinists and eminent Victorians meeting gruesome ends. I don't really care much for plot and suspense is highly overrated. But I'd love to to have a ninny old historian narrator repeatedly use the word 'monobosom." This is definitely the book for you.
That said, I have absolutely no effing idea what to make of this book. It's a post-modern Gothic Romance with a nod to the kind of "serious" name-droppy historical fiction your pretentious uncle reads on those rare occasions he deigns to read fiction at all. It's also a insanely silly sustained riff on the topic of WASP evil narrated by a racist twit obsessed with Victorian underwear and snobbery. It's terrible at moments, but I think it's quite deliberately, even ingeniously terrible. If you've ever thought: "Man, I really want to read a book about Woodrow Wilson and vampires(?) and demonic snakes and something called a 'cannibal sandwich.' I hope it also deals with ghosts and socialists and Calvinists and eminent Victorians meeting gruesome ends. I don't really care much for plot and suspense is highly overrated. But I'd love to to have a ninny old historian narrator repeatedly use the word 'monobosom." This is definitely the book for you.