CARTHAGE
I’ve always enjoyed Joyce Carol Oates’s short stories, but the only novel I remember reading was FOXFIRE, about a girl gang. I know how versatile she is, so I thought I’d give her another trial.
CARTHAGE starts out sounding like a “48 Hours” episode. A girl goes missing in the woods, and her sister’s fiancé, a soldier suffering from PTS, is the principal suspect. But this is Joyce Carol Oates, so I knew there was a twist coming. It took 100 pages but it finally did.
As a reader you have to be wondering if Cressida Mayfield was really murdered or is still alive. This is a book about sibling rivalry. Cressida considers herself the ugly duckling of the family, and Juliet Mayfield is prom queen beautiful with a personality to match, but Cressida is the smart one, and she likes to pretend she doesn’t care what people think of her. Secretly she plays tricks on her older sister, messing up her computer, then fixing it for her to cover up her duplicity.
Then there’s Brett Kincaid, the soldier with PTS, who also has a heart of gold, which proves to be his undoing in more than one way. Cressida crushes on him because he rescued her when she wandered into a bad part of town. There’s more than a suggestion that Brett Kincaid wasn’t blown up by the Taliban. Oates includes what sounds like something out of the Vietnam War, with soldiers taking “trophies” like ears, fingers and toes. Brett balked at that and went to his superiors.
He returns a changed man who doesn’t want to saddle Juliet with his problems; they break up and Cressida makes her play at a time when Brett is drunk and confused as to what actually happened. He’s also having flashbacks to what went on in Afghanistan, and it gets all confused with the Cressida incident. There’s blood in his truck and he has scratches on his face. He confesses.
Zeno Mayfield is the father of the two girls; he’s a former mayor of Carthage, a real take charge kind of guy. What happened to his daughter changes him. His wife resorts to community service, going so far as to forgive Brett and visit him in prison.
The second half of the novel could be a different book, concentrating on a covert prison reform project carried out by an old liberal professor, who’s written several best sellers on various societal pitfalls. He has a young intern assistant, who takes care of the mundane stuff for him, like drive his car, pay his bills, do research etc.
I was expecting a humdinger of a climax, but the book just sort of fades away, with a lot of loose ends, like what happened to the old professor who seemed to have a special fondness for the young intern.
CARTHAGE starts out sounding like a “48 Hours” episode. A girl goes missing in the woods, and her sister’s fiancé, a soldier suffering from PTS, is the principal suspect. But this is Joyce Carol Oates, so I knew there was a twist coming. It took 100 pages but it finally did.
As a reader you have to be wondering if Cressida Mayfield was really murdered or is still alive. This is a book about sibling rivalry. Cressida considers herself the ugly duckling of the family, and Juliet Mayfield is prom queen beautiful with a personality to match, but Cressida is the smart one, and she likes to pretend she doesn’t care what people think of her. Secretly she plays tricks on her older sister, messing up her computer, then fixing it for her to cover up her duplicity.
Then there’s Brett Kincaid, the soldier with PTS, who also has a heart of gold, which proves to be his undoing in more than one way. Cressida crushes on him because he rescued her when she wandered into a bad part of town. There’s more than a suggestion that Brett Kincaid wasn’t blown up by the Taliban. Oates includes what sounds like something out of the Vietnam War, with soldiers taking “trophies” like ears, fingers and toes. Brett balked at that and went to his superiors.
He returns a changed man who doesn’t want to saddle Juliet with his problems; they break up and Cressida makes her play at a time when Brett is drunk and confused as to what actually happened. He’s also having flashbacks to what went on in Afghanistan, and it gets all confused with the Cressida incident. There’s blood in his truck and he has scratches on his face. He confesses.
Zeno Mayfield is the father of the two girls; he’s a former mayor of Carthage, a real take charge kind of guy. What happened to his daughter changes him. His wife resorts to community service, going so far as to forgive Brett and visit him in prison.
The second half of the novel could be a different book, concentrating on a covert prison reform project carried out by an old liberal professor, who’s written several best sellers on various societal pitfalls. He has a young intern assistant, who takes care of the mundane stuff for him, like drive his car, pay his bills, do research etc.
I was expecting a humdinger of a climax, but the book just sort of fades away, with a lot of loose ends, like what happened to the old professor who seemed to have a special fondness for the young intern.
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