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Mudwoman

3.17 of 5 stars 3.17 · rating details · 978 ratings · 257 reviews

A riveting novel that explores the high price of success in the life of one woman--the first female president of a lauded ivy league institution--and her hold upon her self-identity in the face of personal and professional demons, from Joyce Carol Oates, author of the New York Times bestseller A Widow's Story

Mudgirl is a child abandoned by her mother in the silty flats of...more

Hardcover, 448 pages

Published March 20th 2012 by Ecco

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Apr 05, 2012 Gary McTiernan rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is an engrossing but unsettling psychological tale about an accomplished academic who begins to unravel after long-repressed memories from early childhood engulf her. Oates blends gothic horror with behind the scenes politics in the rarified world of an ivy league university. That she can so effectively convey this world, and a depiction of life in a sleepy city in upstate NY, is not surprising given her storytelling gifts. What makes this so compelling is that you aren't sure if what you...more

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Apr 01, 2012 Lolly LKH rated it 5 of 5 stars

I got a hold of a rare edition advanced release read. So time to dig in.

***finished***

This novel is darkly disturbing and I love it. As with many Oates novels, it begins slowly and creeps along until you feel as if you are experiencing M.R.'s life. I am in awe of the writer that can make me feel what the character is feeling. After I finished Mudwoman, I felt anxious and just thought 'whoa'. I know other people have said that it 'goes nowhere'. I suppose if one's goal in reading literature is to...more

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Apr 13, 2012 Sian Lile-Pastore rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: five-star-books, fiction, ahh-these-are-my-favourites

I couldn't decide it it was a four or five star... but have gone for five.... maybe it's a 4.5er though.
I really love Joyce Carol Oates's books, she is a genius and writes incredibly diverse and believable characters. I really love her writing style as well (although I can see that it would not be to everyones taste)the way she uses italics and repetition - in Mudwoman the word 'brackish' comes up over and over again.

Mudwoman is about a woman who becomes president of a university and how her tra...more

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Jul 18, 2012 Snotchocheez rated it 3 of 5 stars

I intentionally waited several weeks to attempt to review JCO's Mudwoman: it left me with a really empty feeling inside, realizing that one of my favorite brood-meisters has quite possibly reached the end of her career, and I so hoped I could show it some Goodreads love and let it percolate its way into a 5-star rating. Um...nope...the 3.11 cume (so far) doesn't lie: it's a creaky mess. And all the more saddening if you realize it was written after her husband of 45+ years passed away, and seems...more

I intentionally waited several weeks to attempt to review JCO's Mudwoman: it left me with a really empty feeling inside, realizing that one of my favorite brood-meisters has quite possibly reached the end of her career, and I so hoped I could show it some Goodreads love and let it percolate its way into a 5-star rating. Um...nope...the 3.11 cume (so far) doesn't lie: it's a creaky mess. And all the more saddening if you realize it was written after her husband of 45+ years passed away, and seems to be her most (if not autobiographical) personal novel to date.

She relates a bizarre, at times far-fetched tale of M.R. Neukirchen, a 40s-ish president of an unnamed Ivy League school (very thinly disgused as Princeton University, where Ms. Oates has resided for decades) who we learn in dream-like flashbacks that her birthmother abandoned her and her baby sister in the mucky bulrushes somewhere in rural upstate New York. The narrative reverts back and forth from her traumatic early years to present day, where we learn, in her duties in leading a university Ms. Neukirchen was horribly traumatized by her upbringing, but strives valiently not to let her gristly past belie her professional facade of pefect decorum and grace under pressure.

It's tough to buy the premise, but if you can look past the implausibilities (and I did), Ms. Oates presents a very engrossing portrait of a woman simultaneously at the top of her game, and at the precipice of meltdown. Where Ms. Oates goes horribly astray (and in the process, practically killing the narrative flow) is when she intersperses poorly-segued dream sequences throughout the novel. It's difficult to fully understand (even with an alternate font) when it's dreamtime craziness, or wakeful insanity Ms. Oates is trying to convey. (Two of the dream sequences in particular, and you'll recognize them immediately when you get to them, are so incredibly bizarre and non-sequitur that i began to question JCO's sanity...they're that strange...EVEN with a career that boasts, among other sordidness, a first person Jeffrey Dahmer-like diary, these dream sequences just, to me, indicate there's a screw loose upstairs, that maybe it's time for her to put away the pen. But I hope I'm wrong.)(less)

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Oct 17, 2012 Linda Flood rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I didn't really like this book and was surprised given how much I usually enjoy this authors work. I found the book confusing, unclear and depressing. I am still not sure which of the musings are real and which are the alter persona Mud Woman's delusions and confusion. Apart from the late connection with her father the main character seems to have no personal ties to anyone and seems to connect on more than a superficial level to no one. I wish that the moral decision regarding accepting or decl...more

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Nov 17, 2012 Elana rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I really want to write a good review of this book. I really do. But, I just can't. This was my first Joyce Carol Oates attempt and I was initially enthralled with the book's premise: the story of a now successful woman who, as a child, was left for dead in a mud flat by her insane mother.
The story of her fight for survival(and eventual success) could have been a heart wrenching and compelling one. Instead, it was confusing and lacked the emotional dynamism I would expect from such a story.
Having...more

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Aug 11, 2012 Kathryn rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: not-book-club

This book is so intricate that I've had to put it down twice to clear my head. I'm about 1/2 done, and so far would heartily recommend it.
Update: I can't remember the last book I read that confused me this much. That's a compliment, not a criticism. Its complexity comes from the very blurry line between reality, dreams, imaginings, and psychosis. Even having finished it, I'm still thinking about it and wondering what will happen next for the protagonist.

One warning - this is not one to listen t...more

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Apr 30, 2013 Chuck rated it 2 of 5 stars

As she becomes president of an unnamed Ivy League university, protagonist Meredith Ruth (a/k/a "M.R." or "Merry") Neukirchen appears to have transcended a highly traumatic early life, but the title of this novel darkly hints otherwise. Meredith is a mudwoman only because she was once a mudgirl, and the earlier inexorably led to the later. But the ultimate significance of this remains obscure. On the final page, Mudwoman is in the middle of her life, with her future quite uncertain. Will she triu...more As she becomes president of an unnamed Ivy League university, protagonist Meredith Ruth (a/k/a "M.R." or "Merry") Neukirchen appears to have transcended a highly traumatic early life, but the title of this novel darkly hints otherwise. Meredith is a mudwoman only because she was once a mudgirl, and the earlier inexorably led to the later. But the ultimate significance of this remains obscure. On the final page, Mudwoman is in the middle of her life, with her future quite uncertain. Will she triumph again over her past, or will she be devoured by her inner demons? Unfortunately, Oates' abrupt and inconclusive ending leaves this question unanswered, and it leaves far too many other strands of the story unresolved as well.

How does a child plucked from a mudflat -- where she was abandoned by a mother suffering from religious delusions -- go on to become an Ivy League university president? One could reasonably suppose that a 428-page novel would fill in that gap, yet the underpinnings of Meredith's transition are left unaccountably vague. To be sure, she was exceptionally bright; she was adopted by loving foster parents who provided a supportive and stimulating intellectual environment; she excelled in public school; and she went on to study at a prestigious college and then a prestigious graduate school where she received her Ph.D. in philosophy. But the substantive developments that must have occurred in those environments are largely omitted.

Oates crisscrosses back and forth between present and past, gothic violence and everyday ordinariness, dream and reality; however, despite the typographical clues, it's not always easy to tell which is which. She constructs a few heart-pounding passages, but there's plenty of slow-moving material that a good editor would have excised (this tale does not require anything close to its published heft). The novel's numerous academic elements may be reassuringly familiar to those who (like Oates) have spent their careers in ivory towers, but, except for a few feverish pages set in the university president's house, readers far removed from the AAUP are likely to oscillate between puzzlement and boredom.

Although there is some admirable writing to be found in this book, those parts lose out to a whole that is bloated and insufficiently formed. Readers are expected to be imaginative, but they can't be expected to do the work that an author should have done.(less)

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Mar 31, 2013 Kathleen Hagen added it

Shelves: 2013-audio

Mudwoman, by Joyce Carol Oates, Narrated by Susan Ericksen, Produced by Harper Audio, Downloaded from audible.com.

This is a novel of many layers. We have a woman, who originally thinks of herself as “Mudgirl” because her insane mother threw her in the quicksand and mud to kill her. But she was pulled out. She was adopted by a middle class couple who try to keep her past and her mother’s institutionalization from her hoping she’ll grow up without scars. But, while she grows up to be extremely int...more

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Mar 25, 2013 Ray rated it 4 of 5 stars

Every time I read a Jonathan Franzen novel I get pissed off on behalf of Anne Tyler. She covers many of the same themes that Franzen seems obsessed with. And while she is highly praised, she pales next to the rock star Franzen has become (this inequity is encapsulated by trade terms: Tyler's fiction is "domestic" while Franzen's is "literary.")

Along those lines, I am now going to cry for Oates every time Jeffery Eugenides' name is mentioned. Both authors share a faux-jaded worldview and seem to...more

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Dec 06, 2012 Allison added it

This was very good, better than I even expected from her other books... I love the every day working life descriptions of the woman president of the University.

I think she based the school on Princeton, where she was writer in residence (still is?) And it seems the president could be Oates herself - the personality is similar to other characters she seemed to be basing on herself -- these characters are often obsessive, myopic, high-strung, perfectionistic, ....

The style of Mudwoman reads more...more

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Nov 09, 2012 Jane rated it 4 of 5 stars

Surprisingly, I really liked this book and didn't find it at all difficult to read, as some of my friends had indicated. I loved Oates writing style, as it is so very descriptive and full of symbolism. For example, she uses various names for the protagonist to indicate different stages of her life/struggles: Jedina, Jewell, Mudgirl, Mudwoman, M.R., Meridith, Merry. These were used throughout either to be historical or to indicate when M.R. was slipping back into her past (into the "mud", so to s...more

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Oct 03, 2012 Beth rated it 5 of 5 stars

There is almost nothing more exciting than finding a new Joyce Carol Oates book on the library shelves. Her newest, Mudwoman, shines with her usual brilliance on every page, captures a kind of personal and social essence that is rarely achieved in literature. I know the word ‘visceral’ is so overused but the actual sensation of reading this book can be described no other way. Mudgirl, Mudwoman, M.R. – an abandoned child, an adopted teenager, president of an elite university. Within her, we see t...more

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Nov 12, 2012 Sheri rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: male-female-power-sex-attractivenes, poverty-class-issues

"You don't have to understand why anything that has happened to you has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains."

At the very end of this complex novel, M. R. makes this declaration to herself. I agree with the statement ("buck up and move on") and live by it myself in many ways, but it seemed like it would have been a better opener to this book. After Oates tells her story, M. R. is much less well adjusted than she was at t...more "You don't have to understand why anything that has happened to you has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains."

At the very end of this complex novel, M. R. makes this declaration to herself. I agree with the statement ("buck up and move on") and live by it myself in many ways, but it seemed like it would have been a better opener to this book. After Oates tells her story, M. R. is much less well adjusted than she was at the beginning before she took the walk by the river and Carlos (always some male figure to the rescue here) comes to her assistance.

The course of the novel follows the psychological unraveling of M. R. The cause of this unraveling is never made (to my mind) satisfactorily clear. In the beginning, she has moved on; she does know that she was mudgirl; she has kept her past to herself, but it is not a past that she has forgotten. She is very stressed and lonely and (as Hans Schneider first told her and she remembers at least 3 other times through the course of the book) being alone prevents one from ever turning off one's mind. And so, at the end of a very long first year as President of Princeton ("the University"), she has a mental and physical breakdown. This I buy, this I will grant Oates as believable.

HOWEVER, I do not get why she does not know to where she is driving in October when she bumbles off the road and hallucinates the Black River Cafe. I do not believe that she did not know where she was (near the site of mudgirl's rescue) or that she did not remember the pivotal event when she later recalls talking to her parents about it and reading about the Skedds' house fire.

I do not get why the events in modern time happen in the way that they happen in this novel. I find the whole psychology of it to be backwards. I think Oates explores some great themes (more below), but I think M. R. is portrayed as too naive in the beginning and too bedraggled in the end. There is simply no motivation for her unraveling.

That said, it was compelling and interesting and Oates tries (although maybe too hard at times) to describe the imbalance of power between men and women (even highly educated liberals): "It was like an aggressive male to not-see, or to ignore, discomfort in another." and "She felt her heart expand with an emotion she could not have named--not love, not sexual desire, but a wish to touch, and to protect; a wish to console. She thought there could be nothing more tender between a man and a woman, than this wish to console." and "Did you think you could escape forever? Did you think you could escape this--forever? It was meant: her femaleness. That she was a woman, in the body into which she'd been born. She had know this--had she? She had not known this, she had cast the knowledge from her, repelled, disbelieving. She had not loved any man, really--she had not had any child nor had she ever been impregnated, the thought had filled her with anxiety, disdain. For that was not her. That was not her wish." and "M.R. must always assure the listener that beneath the raw plea was spiritual well-being, good common sense. Not any sort of hysterical female." and "Always a relief when the astronomer-lover departed. For now the woman could be herself--whatever diminished self."

Oates also explores the imbalance of power between children and adults: "For what were the actions of adults except games, and variants of games. The child was given to know that a game would come to an end unlike other actions that were not-games and could not be ended but sprawled on and on like a highway or a railroad tract or the river". M. R., especially, was a child for whom childhood was dependent on unreliable adults (until she met the Neukirchens).

And of course, there are lots of little quips about class: "Even the word Please felt coercive to her. When you said Please to those who, like Carlos, had no option but to obey, what were you really saying?"

I also liked her reason for why speaking in front of a group is sometimes easier than speaking to individuals: "No speaker makes eye contact with his audience. The larger the audience, the easier. That is the secret."

Overall it was definitely worth reading and sparked some interesting thoughts; I felt that some of the time Oates was copping out (with the use of dream and amnesia not completely consistent throughout) and other times that she was too heavy handed (with some of her feminist comments, especially in M. R.'s dream of leaving the pool), otherwise it would have been a five star.(less)

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Dec 30, 2012 Jennifer rated it 3 of 5 stars

When I picked this book up at the library, it sounded very promising- and the storyline sounded so very interesting. But in the end, I was woefully disappointed. That reaction is probably more a result of personal taste than any literary criticism; I thought the author's writing style detracted from, rather than enhanced, the story. The story I read was definitely different from the one I thought I was going to get, and I was disappointed. In the end, I wasn't sure that anything was really resol...more When I picked this book up at the library, it sounded very promising- and the storyline sounded so very interesting. But in the end, I was woefully disappointed. That reaction is probably more a result of personal taste than any literary criticism; I thought the author's writing style detracted from, rather than enhanced, the story. The story I read was definitely different from the one I thought I was going to get, and I was disappointed. In the end, I wasn't sure that anything was really resolved, except perhaps M.R.'s relationship with her adoptive father. The last few pages didn't seem to bring the story to any real resolution.

What I did find interesting was how the main character, M.R. (Meredith Ruth) twice borrows identities- the first, of her own volition, that of her older sister, and then is given the same identity as her adoptive parents' deceased daughter, who would have been close to M.R. in age. It seems that M.R. is not adopted on her own merits, but rather as a replacement for their biological daughter, who died as a young child. The more the adoptive parents are described, the creepier they seem. I didn't see what this mystery long term relationship she had with the astronomer added to the story.

The parts of the story that take part in the university setting seemed strange as well. I don't work in academia and have zero familiarity with that milieu, so maybe being a university president really is like JCO describes. However, the idea of M.R. not having a medical checkup as she starts to realize she is having problems seemed off. It seems that to be a university president, M.R. would be a take-charge person who would not hesitate to go see a doctor. The entire second half of the book, I was practically inwardly screaming "Go see a doctor!".

Finally, I didn't see this as either particularly dark or unsettling- it was just really weird. In all fairness, however, I was reading this book while also reading "Gone Girl". That book is dark and unsettling.

(less)

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Apr 23, 2012 Emily rated it 3 of 5 stars

Interesting read! I've only read one other JCO - the one loosely based on Jon Benet Ramsey case, and I did not much like it. Mudwoman however had a lot of great parts to it - a very visceral and haunting piece of work. At times I shy away from writers like JCO. She's really into ambiguity and loves to over-write sentences a little bit. Sometimes I think it totally works and its poetic and beautiful, other times it sounds like a parody of how a writer "should" write - a bit tiresome to the reader...more

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Feb 17, 2013 Maria rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favoriten

M.R. Neukirchen s one of the complex characters Carol Joyce Oates writes about. I found this book unsettling and couldn't stop reading although I admit that I skipped some of the "dream"-parts because find it tremendously unsettling not to know if what I am reading is really the STORY of the book or just some dream the main character is having. You could put it otherwise: the story of M.R. Was TOO fascinating to loose time reading about her dreams. That's to put it more positive.
Mudwoman is the...more

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May 19, 2012 Monica Casper rated it 4 of 5 stars

As an academic and a (former) administrator, there was much that I truly loved about this book. Oates perfectly captures the interior life and exterior "performance" of academic administration; I saw in Meredith many recognizable qualities, and occasionally, I saw myself. The first third of the book is lovely as we come to know Meredith and her childhood counterpart, Merry. There were times I thought, this could be Marya all grown up (referencing an earlier Oates book that defined my college yea...more

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May 06, 2012 Heather rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: best-of-2012

I really enjoyed it as a whole; an accomplished adult dealing with childhood trauma(s). I think it was delightfully accurate in the portrayal of creeping madness and inaccurate memory recall. I agree that it was a bit tedious during the scenes of M.R.'s academic life and that as a reader I was more interested in mudgirl than mudwoman. I think that was part of the point---we get only a glimpse of the trauma that Jedina/Jewell suffered b/c "You don't have to understand why anything has happened to...more

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Apr 18, 2012 Donna rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, audiobooks

This novel was just so-so. The peripheral characters were enjoyable, sometimes even remarkable (The foster family, the adoptive parents, and the high school math teacher were really well done.), but M.R. Neukirchen (aka Mudwoman) never quite seemed real to me. Obviously, she is deteriorating psychologically as she is placed under stress and starts to remember her supressed and tormented past, but Oates fails to distinguish reality from dream or psychotic episode, and leaves the reader as confuse...more

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Mar 17, 2013 Elizabeth Moeller rated it 4 of 5 stars

The main character of this book, Meredith, is the first female president of Princeton [or at least of an unnamed ivy league school in New Jersey]. At the beginning, she is capable and busy, rushing to this or that meeting, solving this or that problem. Gradually, she starts to feel paranoid, to feel "less than", to be physically unable to fulfill her obligations. As a woman in a largely male dominated field, I have often struggled with these feelings, of trying to fit my femaleness into a box th...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Kathy Conley rated it 4 of 5 stars

Mudwoman is a slippery, shifting novel, sometimes straight-forward, sometimes mysterious. Oates' main character, M.R.Neukirchen, aka Jewell Kraeck, aka Jedina Kraeck, embodies the idea that we don't always know who we are, and our past is as much a part of us as our present.
Left to die in the mud, Jewell Kraeck is rescued, fostered, and finally adopted by Quaker parents. Rechristened Meredith Ruth, "Merry" stumbles through life, finding solace in academics. The story opens when Merry has reache...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Tina Cipolla rated it 5 of 5 stars

This was my first Joyce Carol Oates book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This main character, M.R., is a fascinating character. She is left for dead as a 3 year old in a mudflat and she is saved by a animal trapper. The story details the rest of her life which by almost all accounts is a fabulous success. She is adopted by parents who adore her--even though she has been adopted as a replacement for their own biological child who has died. She is a star student her entire life and goes on to an Ivy...more

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Apr 23, 2012 Sam Sattler rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary-novel

Mudwoman is dark even by Joyce Carol Oates standards. Oates is well known for novels featuring female leads that do not sense the physical jeopardy they are in before it is almost too late to escape it. Suddenly, these women - as intelligent and accomplished as they may be – recognize that they have wandered into a situation that could cost them their lives. The threat usually comes from an evil or deranged man but, in the case of Mudwoman, all the damage is done by a little girl’s own mother.

W...more Mudwoman is dark even by Joyce Carol Oates standards. Oates is well known for novels featuring female leads that do not sense the physical jeopardy they are in before it is almost too late to escape it. Suddenly, these women - as intelligent and accomplished as they may be – recognize that they have wandered into a situation that could cost them their lives. The threat usually comes from an evil or deranged man but, in the case of Mudwoman, all the damage is done by a little girl’s own mother.

When she is three, Jedina Kraek's mother decides to murder her and her five-year-old sister. Jedina is shaved bald as part of her mother’s religious delusions and tossed into a mud flat near the Black Snake River where her mother assumes that she will drown in the muck. Against all odds, the little girl is found by a mentally handicapped local trapper and taken into a foster family for several years. When the Neukirchens, a childless Quaker couple, adopt her, Jedina (who had mistakenly claimed her older sister’s name, Jewel) becomes Meredith Ruth Neukirchen.

“Merry” does her best to live up to the Quaker standards of her parents, and becomes the model student, an overachiever who compensates for her insecurities by excelling at academics. Secretly, Meredith applies for, and wins, the scholarship to Cornell that she believes will be her ticket to a new life far from stifling Carthage, New York.

Mudwoman is told in chapters that alternate between Meredith’s girlhood and her present life as the first female president of a prestigious Ivy League university. Now 41, and calling herself M.R. Neukirchen, Meredith lives alone in a spooky, “historic” house on campus allocated to the president and spends all of her waking hours on university business – much of it involving fundraisers at which she must impress potential donors with her administrative competence. Oates, herself a Princeton teacher since 1978, is very familiar with this world and she exposes its inner workings here in detail.

Because so much of what takes place in the present happens entirely inside M.R.’s head, the book becomes a contrast between a realistic presentation of her childhood and the more surrealistic presentation of her present day circumstances. What happens when M.R.’s childhood demons intrude upon her present life is often painful to watch. When cracks begin to appear in her public persona, expect to be horrified by M.R.’s mental collapse as the university board of directors tries to contain the damage and deal with the problems she creates for the school.

Mudwoman is frustrating at times because Oates, who is a master of this writing style, wants her readers to be (at least temporarily) as confused as M.R. herself about what is real and what happens only in her dreams. The good news is that patient readers will find that most, but not quite all, of the answers are revealed by the end of the book. Even better news is that they will have spent so much time inside M.R.’s head that they will likely know and understand her as well as they do any fictional character they have ever encountered.

Although it can be a difficult read at times, I highly recommend Mudwoman.
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Apr 06, 2012 Suzanne added it

Joyce Carol Oates is amazing. I've just finished Mudwoman and I'm breathless. I've been reading her books since the'70's. How does she reinvent herself in so many way? M. R. is not Ms. Oates; yet her protagonist's voice is so strong and pleasant and charismatic that I tended to mix them up as M. R. tended to confuse herself. How many of us retell our lives; if only I had done this or that. Perhaps he was threatening me or flirting with me...or ignoring me....he wasn't there.
As I came to the last...more

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Oct 04, 2012 Deborah rated it 4 of 5 stars

JCO spins a fine web for this story, lures us in, goes in for the kill, but then leaves us hanging in a Poe-like fashion. Excellent craftsmanship and a brashly confident use of language. In this story as is often the case in JCO's writing, the main character rises up from the direst of circumstances to a level so high that it feels undeserved; no matter how hard she works, she can never merit the acclaim she receives. The past comes to haunt her and tears at the roots of her success. In this cas...more

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Apr 06, 2013 Don O'goodreader rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: character, education-teaching, literary, literary-novel, politics, women-s-history

I never expected to mention Joyce Carol Oates (uber-literary Princeton professor of creative writing) and Roald Dahl (one of the best in the long line British children's authors from Lewis Carroll to J K Rowling) in the same review. However, Mudwoman by Joyce Carol Oates and Matilda by Roald Dahl share the common plot of a precocious girl born into a horrific environment who rises way above her circumstances, in part by self-teaching herself to read and reading voraciously.

I'm sure this is a lit...more

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Apr 08, 2012 Alecia rated it 2 of 5 stars

I usually love (or at least like a lot) Joyce Carol Oates's work. This one, however, was too ambiguous for me. Her prose is very poetic, and I admire her fluid style, as if words just pour out of her. But this tale of the disintegration of "M.R. Neukirchen", the president of a Princeton-like university, was too fraught with horrific dreams and seemingly fugue-like states to fully engage me. The question of whether something was really happening to M.R., or was she just dreaming or having psychot...more

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Nov 20, 2012 Dana rated it 4 of 5 stars

"Mudwoman" was my introduction to JCO's writing. Her style took a bit of getting used to, but once I got into the rhythm I was mesmerised. From the moment MR begins her descent into the catacombs of her past, I could hear the fibres of the rope tying her to reality snap one by one. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough, until I realised that I was plunging into darkness right along with her, and could only take angst in small doses. The stream of consciousness style was extremely effective in bl...more

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May 05, 2012 Elise rated it 4 of 5 stars

I really liked this because of its subject-a woman in academia, and all of the difficulties, i.e. sexism, backstabbing (real or imagined) she faces. I also work some at the University in question, so that is another thing that I was interested in. Although for the last several years I have found Oates's writing hard to take-too gory and depressing-in this one, she has mellowed, and, save for two painfully graphic descriptions,it was easier to digest. I don't know if anyone will come away with a...more

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About Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. Pseudonyms ... Rosamond Smith and Laure ...more

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Quotes from Mudwoman

“Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.” — 7 people liked it

“The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.” — 6 people liked it

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Mudwoman

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