Wonderland (Modern Library Paperbacks)

published	September 12th 2006 by Modern Library
binding	Paperback
isbn	081297655X (isbn13: 9780812976557)
pages	528
description	Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americ...more [close] 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 [close]
date added	12-18-06 edit book

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Dusty rated it:

09/26/07

Read in September, 2007

A novel in three parts, telling the youth, young adulthood, and fatherhood of Jesse Vogel, who begins life as an orphan after he narrowly escapes his homicidal father (who, when Jesse's like 10, shoots Jesse's mother and siblings, then himself). Much of the first third of the novel details Jesse's life in his foster home, as the adopted son of Dr. Karl Pedersen, a world-famous diagnostician, who adopts Jesse as part of an obsessive need to cultivate an heir, and this section easily contains the ...more A novel in three parts, telling the youth, young adulthood, and fatherhood of Jesse Vogel, who begins life as an orphan after he narrowly escapes his homicidal father (who, when Jesse's like 10, shoots Jesse's mother and siblings, then himself). Much of the first third of the novel details Jesse's life in his foster home, as the adopted son of Dr. Karl Pedersen, a world-famous diagnostician, who adopts Jesse as part of an obsessive need to cultivate an heir, and this section easily contains the novel's most compelling passages, mostly because the drama driving the narrative is Jesse's pull away from his birth father's shameful, murderous past (which is to say, then, his pull toward the seeming wholesomeness and success of Dr. Pedersen), and yet also his pull away from Dr. Pedersen's oppressive parenting. Here is a man who carts his daughter—a math savant—around the country to show her off to specialists, and all the while this daughter eats everything within reach to deal with the stress and loathes every fiber of his father's being. Here is a man whose son shuts himself up in his room pecking out notes for his musical compositions, who, too, is unhealthfully overweight and never speaks during family meals. Every scene is a big ball of tension.

Then Jesse alienates himself from the family and becomes a hard-working medical student. This encompasses the novels' extremely long second section. Then he marries and has two daughters, and the third section of the novel proceeds much like Roth's American Pastoral, in the way that Jesse's youngest daughter runs away from home and gets involved with that Kooky Sixties Counterculture, to the point where Jesse's final act becomes the quest to find her in some urban slum and return her to the home.

Oates's ending is meant to suggest that despite everything Jesse does in the second third of this novel to become anybody but either the homicidally crazed father that sired him or the obsessively crazed father that raised him, he's doomed to repeat the very same acts of parental control he once suffered from. But, like, what Jesse does at the end is cleverly track his daughter down in some apartment where she's suffering from jaundice and malnutrition, and bring her home, where he can probably feed her and get her to, you know, live longer than one more summer.

Am I that much of a square that I can read no instance of "demonic-paternal control" (Oates's words for it, from her Afterword; something she calls "the tragedy of America in the 1960s") in this novel's final act? Shelley (the daughter) shows no ability to take care of herself. Was it the super special gift of the Sixties to let free spirits follow their blisses regardless of whether it killed them?

Sigh, boomers. Roth does far more stellar things with point of view and the sentence, so just read his book and not this one....less

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Wonderland (Modern Library Paperbacks)

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