A Great Oates Novel With a Touch of the Tawdry

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	• You Must Remember This Joyce Carol Oates Plume, 1998 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The 1950's Is The Real Main Character

Oates, my favorite writer, refuses to give in to those who would have us think the 1950's were a placid, contented decade of plenty for everyone. In truth they were fraught with perils, economic and social, and under the surface of post-war calm, the decade boiled with tensions that underlay the fears of the American psyche. In these pages, behind the tale of an incestuous love story of a teenaged niece and her half-uncle, a boxer who might merit a title shot, is the Red Scare, the fear of the bomb, the social intolerance of McCarthyism, and the terror of the consequences of straying from the norms the American culture had set.

My favorite scene in this book, and also its most frustrating, is when the father of the family at the heart of this energetic, moody novel, is taken into custody and ruthlessly interrogated by governmental agents, after he is reported for possible "Red sympathies". The cause of this detention? The man had opened an atlas at his store to show an ignorant, argumentative "true blue red-blooded patriotic American" that China, against which the US was at war in Korea at that time, was geographically larger than the United States.

In the '50's, that could be all it took to ruin someone's life.

You Must Remember This IS also the tale of a secret sexual affair between a teenage girl and her own father's half-brother. It begins with one of the most compelling and addicting ten pages in literature, as the girl undertakes a suicide attempt in her family's presence, in the dead of night. This action funnels any worthy reader in for at least the next hundred pages, at which point it becomes too late to turn back: Oates has already woven her spell.

You Must Remember This does not set out to be all things to all readers, but in its tale of tragic love, political intimidation and nuclear fears infiltrating the country's subconscious, it is very nearly that.

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Inconspicuous Virtuosity

I read this novel many years ago, and remain to this day struck by the author's ability to: (1) place herself inside the bodies and personas of her characters; (2) to narrate the passage of events-- and her characters' subjective responses to those events-- from within the perspective of those personas, and (3) to depict the makeup of her characters-- especially of their darker sides-- as both inherently human and as embodiments of the environment that shaped these individuals.

More specifically, I've never encountered a female author who could so convincingly assume a male identity and point of view-- not only psychologically, but even bodily and kinesthetically-- and had the technical skill to bring it to life through the pages of a novel. THAT is an astounding achievement and alone makes this novel worth reading.

Not less noteworthy is this novel's depiction of time and place-- both in history and on a map, as well as within the collective American psyche.

I think I may revisit this book soon ...

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A Great Oates Novel With a Touch of the Tawdry

This novel from 1987 by Oates hits many of Oates's strengths with a touch of Lolita or incest, but without the mental obsessions of Nabokov's famous novel. All in all, it is one of Oates's most interesting novels and I recommend the book.

Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 in upstate New York State and is a distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton. She gained fame with her first novel With Shuddering Fall in 1964. Now four decades later, she is the author of scores of novels, many short stories, essays, plays, and poetry. The present novel from 1987 is somewhere near the middle of the chronological order of her body of work and we see the polished prose of an experienced writer.

I have read a number of her works from different time periods in her career and set up a Guide to Joyce Carol Oates Listmania list. Compared to her early novels, this is a straightforward and almost a "light" read. It contains some drama but there are a few intense scenes, but less than in some other works. The novel has a good story structure and easy prose, and the reader is spared the "too much prose" found in some early works such as The Assassins. The read is mostly compelling.

Oates is known for her emotional and dramatic stories, often with women or even poor women such as students or teachers caught up in stressful situations, and often set in her native upstate New York (Niagara River - Syracuse - Erie,PA. triangle). Actually, some of her best work is found in her 10 to 20 page short stories, which are often dramatic, sometimes very intense, and many involve off-beat characters, and they include rapes, murders, and people with serious mental health issues, etc. People who have not read her collections of short stories should take a look at those. The present novel contains many of those off-beat elements. It is a story set in a town in upstate New York. The story is about a middle class family and their uncle, a retired fighter, who is about 20 years younger than the father. The father runs a used furniture store. The story is set in the post WII years and the fifties, and contains some political and social elements from that era including the development of nuclear weapons, peace protests, bomb shelters, the McCarthy hearings, citizens being arrested for being suspected communists, Cadillac cars with big fins, etc.

The story is mostly about the youngest daughter, Enid Stevick, who is a young teenage student and their flamboyant uncle aged 30 or so, Felix. As mentioned, he is their father Lyle's step brother. They live in the industrial port town of Orinskay, New York, a town similar to other American industrial towns on the Great Lakes.

This is a relatively compelling read, but lacks the intensity of some of Oates's short stories. As a work by Oates it is a well balanced and interesting work. It is about the characters and how they change as they age, and particularly but not exclusively the interaction of Uncle Felix and Enid. This is one of her better novels, on par with We Were The Mulvaneys, a more recent novel.

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A great read

Joyce Carol Oates does it again in this poignant book. Highly recommended.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

Joyce Carol Oates's epic novel of an American family in the 1950's probes the tender division between the permissible and the forbidden, between ordinary life and the secret places of the heart. Set in an industrial, working-class town in upstate New York, this book chronicles the frustrating marriage of parents Lyle and Hannah; the idealistic political journey of son Warren, and the passionate, obsessive relationship that develops between 15-year-old Enid Maria and her uncle Felix, a professional boxer twice her age. While brilliantly re-creating a decade that worshipped conformity, You Must Remember This presents the lives of family members that break every convention in the search for meaning and fulfillment.

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