We are inexplicably drawn to lengthy ghost stories at O'Lantern. There is something deeply satisfying about the grand scope of Bellefleur; the many explanations of what goes bump in the night (and sometimes during the day) in the family castle. Reading Bellefleur is akin to watching the wonderfully campy Dark Shadows soap opera from the 1960s, though Oates presents some far darker images throughout the book. The characters’ relationships are quite complex and the Bellefleur clan is full of secrets and family myth; myth which turns out, more often than not, to be true.
From the back cover: A wealthy and notorious clan, the Bellefleurs live in a region not unlike the Adirondacks, in an enormous mansion on the shores of mythical Lake Noir. They own vast lands and profitable businesses, they employ their neighbors, and they influence the government. A prolific and eccentric group, they include several millionaires; a mass murderer; a spiritual seeker who climbs into the mountains looking for God; a wealthy noctambulist who dies of a kitten scratch; a young girl whose passion for her uncle can only be acted out on the silver screen; a brilliant boy-scientist; a baby, Germaine—the heroine of the novel—who is born with the lower half of her male twin protruding from her abdomen; a female vampire who, in her girlhood had a passionate but doomed affair; and a lovely young woman, Leah, Germaine's mother.
From Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates home page: The dramatic trajectory of Oates's career, especially her amazing rise from an economically straitened childhood to her current position as one of the world's most eminent authors, suggests a feminist, literary version of the mythic pursuit and achievement of the American dream. Yet for all her success and fame, Oates's daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast. Not surprisingly, a quotation from that other prolific American writer, Henry James, is affixed to the bulletin board over her desk, and perhaps best expresses her own ultimate view of her life and writing: "We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
Price: $14.50
