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• The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel (P.S.)
Joyce Carol Oates

Harper Perennial, 2008 - 624 pages

average customer review:based on 43 reviews
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   highly recommended  highly recommended






The Biography of Rebecca Schwart

How can one write a review of this book?--a novel so rich and dark, that takes on a life of its own, like Madame Bovary or The Great Gatsby, or Passage to India; and the comparison is not too extreme. This is a great, a brilliant novel, a work of literature that will endure.

The Gravedigger's Daughter is the story of the life of Rebecca Schwart, mostly set in upstate New York. But it is at its heart the story of the Holocaust and the reverberations of the Holocaust that spread like ripples or maybe rather like tsunami through the years and generations. It is not over. Any event of the magnitude of the Holocaust will have these kinds of effects on the children and grand children of the few who survive, but only a great novelist can capture the details and make it come alive.

This novel is inexhaustible. Oates captures the darkness and dinginess of much of upstate New York, the poverty of a land that American prosperity has passed by. I live here, I know and still I love it, as I believe Oates does. It is novel about strength of character, and about ugly violence, and strength in the face of violence. It is about the love of a parent for her child. It is about love and violence in what may pass as a marriage. It is about how our families and pasts haunt us, although few of us has had a past or family as disturbed as Rebecca's. Her strength and her character save her, and this is marvelous. They save her life, but cannot quite save her soul.

It would be foolish of me to carp at details, but fool that I am, I can't help it. Oates has a party of skiers enter a hotel on the St Lawrence River near Watertown. There are no hills or skiing (except cross-country now) for many many miles from Watertown, or the St Lawrence, where the land is as flat as Kansas. A few other details are oddly askew--hikers slipping on shale in the Thousand Islands which is almost all hard pink granite; you cannot drive to Grindstone Island. Why bother with these details? Oates is writing about people not places.

Oates' writing is in sentence fragments, short snippets, and then long standardly written paragraphs--a potpourri of styles. She writes from many points of view--but mostly from Rebecca's. All of this works. The novel moves swiftly and surely. It is a masterpiece. (And I am no particular fan of Oates'--see my review of American Appetites--until now that is.)

At points I could not "put the book down" as they say. At others, it was so painful that I could only read a page at a time, squinting and holding my breath. The first part of the novel (it is almost neatly divided into two or perhaps three separate novels) is extremely disturbing, dark, and painful to read. The reader should be aware that this will not be easy or pleasant going, but persist. Persist like Rebecca did. You will be glad you did and find things in yourself you didn't realize were there.


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Too wordy

I struggled to get through the first 220 pages that was unneccessarily lengthy. After the first 200 pages the story begins to pick as the main character Rebecca has that life changing moment at a very young age. The rest of the book you follow Rebecca through her life story which involves becoming a single parent and taking on a new identity. You feel sorry for her for the fact that her first "romantic" relationship is so troubled. The author does a good job of making Rebecca into a naive and tragic character. The ending didn't work for me either, the mood didn't fit with the flow of the rest of the book.


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The Music of Life

Rebecca Schwarts is the gravedigger's daughter. In many ways she is the ultimate Joyce Carol Oates heroine: flawed, cowed by life, the child of hysterically dysfunctional parents, orphaned by a family tragedy yet always hopeful, always wanting a better life, always yearning. Because of all that befalls Rebecca she builds a wall of despair and impotence around her: "All they knew of Rebecca was that she kept to herself. She had a stubborn manner, a certain stiff-backed dignity. She wouldn't take bs from anybody."
Rebecca's father held his family in terror: he lorded over them and kept them ignorant of the outside world: Mr. Schwarts bought a radio one day and rather than share the news of the day with his family (as in WW2) locked himself and the radio in his den. All that Mr. Schwarts' family (wife, daughter, two sons) knew was that Schwarts had escaped an unspeakable life in Germany: "her (Rebecca's) father had been grievously wounded in his soul."
Mr. Schwarts was fearful of the world, despised it even: "They do not know us Rebecca. Not you and not me. Hide your weakness from them and one day we will repay them! Our enemies who mock us."
Schwarts has invested in his daughter with a fear of the world, a wariness of anything "out there."
Somehow a man, Niles Tignor finds Rebecca, who while working as a housekeeper in a hotel and marries her: "Tignor had not asked about her parents and might not have wanted to know more."
Rebecca, always hopeful, always wanting to find someone that she can count on gives her all to her marriage to Tignor: she even has a child. "It was said of Tignor that you never got to know--but what you did know you were impressed by."
Rebecca's marriage to Tignor goes sour ("he (Tignor) could make her come like a dog when he snapped his fingers...") both on a personal, physical level and on an emotional one and Rebecca finds it necessary to escape and to change her name to Hazel Jones.
In large part due to her youth and good looks, Rebecca is able to make a new life for herself though always fearful that Tignor will find her. This fleeing is a major step for Rebecca, daughter of European peasants: "You made your bed....now lie in it...it was the gritty wisdom of the soil. It was not to be questioned. Her wounds would heal, her bruises would fade."
Then Rebecca and her son Zack are found by Chet Gallagher and both of their worlds change forever. ("She did love him, she supposed. In the man's very weakness that filled her with wild flailing contempt like a maddened winged creature trapped against a screen she loved him")
"The Gravediggers Daughter" is Oates's greatest accomplishment in a career of major, major work: "Missing Mom," The Falls" and my own personal favorite, "We were the Mulvaneys." But despite these career highpoints and probably because of them, Oates has even improved upon her best work with this sprawling, intelligent, gorgeously written novel of Redemption on the one hand and the Power of Love on the other.
The world that Oates has created here is one in which good acts are rewarded with a good life: a world in which there is hope and that hope is not smashed and assaulted but actually leads to a better relationships, a better understanding of love and a better life.
"The Gravedigger's Daughter" is Oates at her most hopeful, her most positive, her most forcefully repellent of all of her usual dark impulses and as such it is Oates at her most refreshing, her most emotionally thrilling and humanely thoughtful.




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Psychologically riveting -- a dark tale full of courage

"The Gravedigger's Daughter" by Joyce Carol Oates is an epic saga about the life of Rebecca Schwart, the American born daughter of Jewish-German immigrants fleeing Hitler's Holocaust. In Germany, Rebecca's parents were highly educated and cultured members of the middle class, but in America, they become the lowest of the low. Rebecca becomes the gravedigger's daughter, a child raised in abject poverty and abuse with no knowledge whatsoever about her Jewish heritage.

This is a work about immigrant and survivor shame, and how it can destroy and damage lives. It is a story of emotional and physical abuse, resilience, and survival--the tale of a flawed heroine who reinvents herself over and over again merely to get by in a world that seems to conspire at every turn to do her harm. Rebecca turns into a woman running from herself--running from her past--reinventing herself at every turn of adversity. Rebecca is a woman who never has the luxury to know who she is underneath the mask of her composed and pleasant façade. Rebecca's life is an open wound, a hideous secret she keeps hidden from everyone, including her husband and son.

The story spans the period from Rebecca's birth in 1936 to her retirement years in 1999. Events do not unfold in chronological order. There are many flashbacks, often repeatedly to the same traumatic scenes as Rebecca relives them in her mind during different stages in her life.

The book has a number of ungainly segments that may leave some readers restless, rushing ahead to find where the threads of the story pick up again. In particular, I found the beginning overly long and tedious. But if readers persist, and love Joyce Carol Oates' writing, they will be rewarded handsomely by the end of this almost-600-page novel.

Despite the dark and repeatedly violent themes, this is not a depressing story. It is a story brimming with courage--a story fascinating at almost every turn. The book provides a richly nuanced psychological study of a completely believable fictional human being. The secondary characters are vividly described and unforgettable, but most take on almost fable-like dimensions. It gives the book a strange Wizard-of-Oz feeling, like a real woman caught up in a horrific fable-like environment.

Joyce Carol Oates' writing displays her usual exceptional mastery and literary acumen. Her writing sweeps the reader away on a torrent of emotion. In the end, everything about this book seems right, including its ungainliness and the near-otherworldly humans that populate Rebecca's life--the overall effect is to transmit all that much more added realism to the whole. It is as if there were alchemy and synergy at work within this prose.

This book leaves the reader with a searing psychological portrait of a unique Jewish-American woman--a second-generation survivor of immigrant shame. You learn to understand Rebecca's path from a wide-eyed innocent child, to a victim of violent physical abuse, to a guarded woman no longer capable of love, and finally to a lonely pleasant retired lady still hiding her past, but finally moderately content within herself for the person she has become, and the path it took her to get there.

I fell in love with the book's epilogue! Perhaps, it is worth reading this entire work purely for the opportunity to read and understand this incredible ending. The epilogue brings the story around full circle--as only great literature can--and provides one of the most enjoyable, fascinating, and heartbreaking exchanges of letters that you may every find in a work of literary fiction. It is an exchange of letters between 62-year-old Rebecca, a retired lady living in a wealthy WASP retirement enclave in Florida, and her long lost cousin Freyda, now a world-renown Holocaust survivor and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Well-situated in comfortable luxury, Rebecca despairs because she continues to feel that she does not belong--that she is living a lie. Only to Freyda does she admit who she really is.

Another good reason to read this book is that it is an unusual example of Joyce Carol Oates' writing. The author obviously has a real affinity and love for this work. Typically Oates finishes about one novel per year. She is famous for her literary fecundity. But "The Gravedigger's Daughter" is a work that Oates worked on, in bits-and-pieces, for over a dozen years. It is a highly personal tale--one based loosely on the life of her maternal grandmother, who like Rebecca's mother, was a Jewish immigrant forced by circumstances to deny her heritage. Oates' grandfather was a gravedigger, like Rebecca's father. He did not kill his wife, but he did threaten her, and his daughter, and eventually committed suicide with a shotgun. So there are many parallels here, but this is a work of fiction and Oates does not consider it to be a fictional biography. Perhaps, Oates might confess that the works developed into something more akin to a forensic psychological profile--an effort to bring the personality of her late grandmother alive on the page, rather than to convey the exact details of the woman's life.

I have always enjoyed Joyce Carol Oates' dark tales, and this one did not disappoint. I recommend it highly for its psychological depth, vivid storytelling, and eye-opening insights into the darker realms of the human condition.


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