Essays and Nonfiction

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Essays and Nonfiction

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1avaland
abr. 9, 2009, 2:51 pm

Under Construction

3Fullmoonblue
Editat: abr. 16, 2009, 1:31 am

I began Uncensored:Views and (Re)views this evening. After turning first to her treatment of Kazuo Ishiguro (focused mainly on When We Were Orphans, which I haven't yet read) I decided to skip the Ishiguro until reading Orphans and turned to Oates' "New Memoir", a review of Alice Sebold's Lucky.

JCO begins "New Memoir" with a few comments on Sebold's better known work of fiction, The Lovely Bones. As I started the essay, I immediately remembered reading The Lovely Bones last summer, and recalled how strangely drawn in by it I'd felt. I honestly hadn't expected to like the book; instead, I read it mostly because my sister had offered to loan me a copy and I recognized that it was, as Oates puts it, "one of those bestsellers described as 'runaway' to distinguish them from more lethargic bestsellers that merely slog along selling copies in the six-figure range." So I picked it up one evening when I couldn't fall sleep and began reading... and finished it at about six later that morning. It was a very, very quick and at times very powerful read, and I went in search of Lucky, Sebold's memoir, within days of finishing it.

Back to JCO. Before getting to her thoughts on Lucky, Oates classifies The Lovely Bones as more like young adult lit than an "adult novel". This distinction made a lot of sense to me, thinking back on the story and how Sebold crafted it. Its whole goal, JCO notes, "is to confirm what we wish we could believe {about death and the afterlife} and not to unsettle us with harsh, intransigent truths about human cruelty." This summary of Lovely Bones seemed right on target to me. It's a novel told from heaven, by a narrator whose horrific death in the story's first pages immediately gains her the reader's sympathies. Then Oates does a fantastic job of contrasting the sympathy Sebold managed to gain for her fictional narrator within a matter of pages with her own far less rosy reception by others when she herself was a rape victim during her college years.

Anyway. I feel like I've got a far better sense of a really insightful, productive way to view Lucky and The Lovely Bones beside each other now, and would definitely recommend either one to anybody here who hasn't read them yet. Their subject matter and narrative voice are fairly Oatesy, too, in a way that members of this group would probably appreciate. ;)

4avaland
Editat: abr. 16, 2009, 11:38 am

Blue, I haven't read that particular essay yet, sounds terrific, though. I read Lovely Bones at Book Expo America, the year it was given out as an ARC. You will laugh, but I heard a bookseller talking about it to other booksellers in the line waiting for open stalls in the ladies' room (I was in one of those stalls). The bookseller couldn't remember the name of the book or the author but knew bone or bones was some part of it, but she said she stayed up all night to finish it. At the end of that day, in my hotel room, I found the book in the bottom of my tote bag and read it that evening. I was fairly good at recognizing what would be 'big' at that point and I knew immediately this would be. My response to the book was much like yours, although it has not been a book that has stayed with me.

5avaland
set. 21, 2010, 4:27 pm

Added Rough Country to list above.

6Caroline_McElwee
oct. 6, 2010, 11:04 am

Looking forward to getting into my copy of Rough Country but so far have only read the Shirley Jackson essay, as I'd just read her novel We always lived in the castle - and although the JCO essay was supposed to be the introduction in the edition I had, it had been omitted!

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