Inexperienced with men as with another species of being. For a lost moment, she thinks he may be in bed beside her and she panics over this entirely new intimacy she now shares with a spouse:Ī virgin, 29 years old. The most endearing and successful passages come early, such as those describing the anxious suspension Ariah experiences waking up in the hotel unsure where her new husband has gone. The elements of an affecting work of fiction seem present and, before it wears you down from an overabundance of background histories, the book does sporadically grab you. The Burnaby family thus forms - three children, one of which we always suspect is from the first husband’s frantic “spiteful” seed - around which Ariah clings with increasing desperation, convinced she’s destined to be abandoned again and again and determined to prove she doesn’t need anyone outside of her family. Though they share not a single full conversation during the dazed search for Ariah’s missing husband (his body eventually turns up bloated and meat-textured after its week under water), Dirk - a previously entrenched bachelor - inexplicably falls so deeply in love with the widow-bride that they marry within weeks of Ariah’s first marriage. Lacking any better way to handle the public relations fiasco, the hotel’s proprietor gives her the company of Dirk Burnaby, a handsome, hulking attorney and chamber of commerce playboy known for his persuasive charisma. The disastrous honeymoon wins the hushed sympathy of the luxury hotel she’s staying in. Ariah is left feeling as though her day-long marriage was a divine joke played on her lonely life - “no one can help me.

So he tosses his guilt and his life into the Falls, leaving his wife of one day, lanky and pale Ariah Littrell, a twenty-nine year old permanently blushing piano teacher, as a reluctant local legend: “The Widow-Bride of the Falls.” Though both bright and inward, awkward but talented, Ariah and Gilbert never share an “I love you” between them, just an engagement arranged by their parents that seems to fulfill what their lives otherwise lack. Every shadow and echo of every memory erased.” “Your brain,” Oates writes, “ that one-of-a-kind repository of you, will be pounded into its chemical compounds: brain cells, molecules, atoms. Set in 1950, a young newlywed Presbyterian reverend, Gilbert Erskine, seeks release from a marriage he knows isn’t sincere through the mesmerizing power of the Falls.

The close-knit family psycho-drama that the author intends, a story of the hidden resentments all families carry, simply loses its purpose as its scope is blown out of proportion to match the massive scenery of Niagara Falls. Joyce Carol Oates had a grand idea for a novel and here, in novel form with The Falls, she presents what feels like a detailed outline - 479 dense pages, but something still closer to summary than immersion.

The falls by joyce carol oates