Book #7: The Falls

Title: The Falls
Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Let me start out by saying I love Joyce Carol Oates in the way that a lot of people love Anne Tyler (who, by the way, I do not love). I'm slowly working my way through Oates's body of work, and since she has been pretty prolific, it's slow-going. But just like I get tired of reading about quirky families in Baltimore in Tyler's books, I'm beginning to tire of the families who can't seem to bring themselves to talk with each other in Oates's books.

In The Falls, Ariah Burnaby's first husband commits suicide by jumping over Niagra Falls on their wedding night. A month later she remarries one of the men who helped in the recovery operation and they have a passionate courtship and a happy marriage for about 12 years. But Ariah is weird and suspicious and has a hard time when her lawyer husband gets too emotionally invested in one of his cases. He dies (is it murder or suicide or just a tragic accident?) and she becomes a recluse, raising her three kids by herself and never, ever speaking of her husband again. Eventually there's reconciliation and the book ends sort of happily.

I admire the writing. And I loved the first half of the book (the fatal first marriage, the courtship, the happy years of the second marriage), but I just want to shake Ariah. I mean, talk to someone, let your feelings out, get over it, already. I guess I'm just not tortured enough by anything that has happened in my own life to relate.

And I wonder if this lack of tourturedness is what makes me afraid to write fiction. Just look at the picture of Joyce Carol Oates on the back of the book jacket-- she looks dramatic and exotic, sort of otherworldly. I've heard her interviewed on NPR, and her voice matches her appearance. And then, on the other hand, you have me: the all-American girl with the charmed childhood, the happy marriage, the three beautiful kids, basically skating through life. Novels aren't written about life experiences like mine. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy begins his story by saying, "All happy families resemble on another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I guess I'm just afraid that if I write from my life experience it will be boring.

So instead of taking the leap of writing myself, I'm happy to play armchair quarterback, and sit back and criticize the work of people who have more courage than I do.

--originally published 2/7/06