All honor and praise to Joyce Carol Oates. We expect that if science can accomplish such things and she is willing, her brain will one day be among the most valuable relics to grace a Princeton University pickle jar.
We are all glad that we read The Accursed. One member even loved it (I consider it important to note that this particular member just finished writing a 450-page novel herself, and happily wallowed through Oates’ 600-plus pages within a week or so). Some of us are just wired for gothic, labyrinthine sentences, language so rich it leaves a coating on your brain, and story so wildly crafted that you can’t see to the edges of its vast universe.
The Accursed traces the lives of Princeton, New Jersey’s upper class during the reign of a bloody and unspeakable curse. Is Annabelle Slade the victim of her own twisted appetites, or bewitched by a demon? Was Professor Pearce Van Dyck cuckolded by the same demon,his child a changeling, or is he a madman, his child a bastard? And why is it–Count English Von Gneist by some accounts favors the look of the sinister Axson Mayte, yet others see in him a saint or a god? For good measure, Oates throws in the question of whether young author Upton Sinclair will starve himself and his new family to death in horror over the state of the meatpacking industry. See? The Accursed is not for the reader who likes to know, once and for all, what the heck is going on here.
We all agreed that, in addition to being wild and rich and gothic-labarynthine, The Accursed is masterfully written. Scary-masterful. Oates is clearly in a class beyond even the gifted among us, and her work destined to outlive most.
We also discovered, thanks to our attentive facilitator (we have been rotating facilitators so far–much more fun than having a single maven), that The Accursed is actually the fifth in a series of gothic novels by Oates. This reassured me, as a reader, since the story did appear to take rather odd turns, which I now believe are resolutions of earlier plot-lines. The rambling oddness was not out of place, but reading 600-plus pages of considerable oddness did make me scratch my head at times.
The verdict: the beauty of this book is that you can read it either as a weird, fantastic tale, a literary gross-out of a thick summer read; or as a shape-shifting parable in which the upper class may be taking some deserved medicine for the horrors they and their monstrous appetites have visited upon others. For sure, The Accursed is huge, it’s dense, and it’s not for the faint of heart.
FALL BOOK CLUB PICK: THE ROUND HOUSE BY LOUISE ERDRICH!