Oates' Best - A World of Constant Battles

books:


	• Wonderland (Modern Library Paperbacks) Joyce Carol Oates Modern Library, 2006 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

the great american novel

the great american novel. right up there with grapes of wrath, an american tragedy and catcher in the rye.

Classic Oates

I love Joyce Carol Oates novels, and this is one of her masterpieces imho. The characters are most fascinating and strange, and the plot is complex and hard to foresee. Highly recommended!

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Gripping (mostly)

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the literary geniuses of our time. She has an uncanny way of capturing people. Wonderland, although it is one of her earlier novels and in a slightly different style than she normally writes, is no exception. It is a gripping tale of Jesse Harte, a seemingly ordinary young boy living in upstate New York in the 1930s. At sixteen, tragedy strikes his family, and Jesse is swept into a maelstrom of life-changing events. The book follows him throughout his life, showing how his circumstances have changed him, particularly in the way he relates to other people.

Oates' books are usually more character-driven than plot-driven, which is why I enjoy her so much. She can build intracacies of character, the nuances that one recognizes in real-life people. All of the characters in the book are recognizable in some fashion. And even though the book occurs from the late 1930s until the 70s (and was, in fact, published in the early 1970s), it doesn't feel dated.

Also, as with her other books, she is gifted in her wordcraft. The repetitions of certain sounds and words gives it a feeling of poetry at times, but not in a contrived fashion.

The only problem I have with Wonderland is its conclusion. It feels a little like Oates wanted to end the story quickly and chose a kind of clichéd ending. That aside, I recommend this book for anyone who enjoys subtle psychology and the grimness of reality.

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Oates' Best - A World of Constant Battles

I originally read Wonderland when I was a teenager and remembered only a little of it, so it was a revelation when I read it again a few weeks ago. This is a study of one human being and the torments he endures at the hands of others as he grows up, and how it damages his personality. However, Jesse seemingly prevails, and by the novel's end shows us that the human spirit is never completely extinguished. Jesse is such a real character I expect to see him as a flesh and blood person one day. No doubt, this is JCO's best work.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

Joyce Carol Oates?s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. Spanning from the Great Depression to the turbulent Vietnam War era, Wonderland is the epic account of Jesse Vogel, a boy who emerged from a family tragedy with his life spared but his world torn apart. Orphaned after watching his father murder his entire family, Jesse embarks on a personal odyssey that takes him from a Dickensian foster home to college and graduate school to the pinnacle of the medical profession. As an adult, Jesse must summon the strength to reach across the ?generation gap? and rescue his endangered teenaged daughter, who has fallen into the drug-infused 1960s counterculture.

Hailed by Library Journal as ?the greatest of Oates?s novels,? Wonderland is the capstone of a magnificent literary excursion that plunges beneath the glossy surface of American life.

Wonderland is the final novel in Joyce Carol Oates?s Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and them, are also available from the Modern Library.

J

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