The Biography of Rebecca Schwart

books:


	• The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel (P.S.) Joyce Carol Oates Harper Perennial, 2008 - 624 pages average customer review:based on 46 reviews view larger image
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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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Excellent Read!

I can't believe anyone would not like this book!*(Last poster---huh?) I could not put it down.. read it every chance I got. Its haunting, beautiful, a triumph... No one evokes such emotional power like Oates... I found myself wincing out loud, smiling, crying. *If you liked the book "The Devil Wears Prada" BETTER than the movie, than you may not like this book, as it may be too "heavy" for you.

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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