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Do With Me What You Will

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DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL brings to life a most transfixing heroine, Elena Howe. A novel with a contemporary setting reflecting today's social upheavals and shifting morality, it is, in the author's words, "a love story that concentrates upon the tension between two American 'pathways': the way of tradition, or Law; and the way of spontaneous emotion--in this case, Love. In the synthesis of these two apparently contradictory forces lies the inevitable transformation of our culture.

561 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

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About the author

Joyce Carol Oates

854 books9,643 followers
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

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5 stars
106 (21%)
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166 (34%)
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143 (29%)
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45 (9%)
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26 (5%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
Profile Image for Alysson Oliveira.
386 reviews47 followers
August 26, 2019
It is clearly a book for JCO die-hard fans, and most common readers may find it dated. But what I think is more important here is how she investigates the politics of desire and sex. The novel gives us a sense of a bygone era, and it is interesting to contrast it with our present time. The fact that it was published in the early 1970s, says a lot about how things have changed since then – not always for better.
Profile Image for Ryan.
270 reviews16 followers
December 27, 2010
The worst part of this messy and incohesive 562-page (in the hardcover edition!) book is that there is a pretty fantastic much shorter novel hiding in there somewhere. When your primary protagonist is so meek, colorless and mute that she literally speaks about 5 words in the whole book, you better have something else going on. There is some interesting stuff about American radicalism, and civil rights, and the clash of the classes, but it's obscured by so much pointless navelgazing that the whole book just becomes tedious and crazymaking. If about 200 pages were shaved out of this novel, it would probably be great. Any book that long really needs to earn it, and this book doesn't. Maybe since JCO had just won the National Book Award here editor was afraid to challenge her or something. I don't know. It's my first book of hers and I'll read more, but I can't say I recommend this one to anyone.
Profile Image for Dan.
2,235 reviews67 followers
January 19, 2018
Tried to pick this back up after putting it down in favor of reading other books from my to be read list and just cannot get into this. I tried, and I felt that this book had some great meaning or something I just wasn't catching. But the truth is I cannot get into a court drama themed book. I honestly find that aspect extremely boring. I have to DNF(Did Not Finish) this book. and accept that is just not for me. To those who managed to get through this you are a trooper, but I cannot waste time on a book I am not enjoying.
Profile Image for Sherrie Miranda.
Author 2 books148 followers
January 22, 2016
3.0 stars A Lost Soul Drifting through Life, Being Whatever Her Controller Wanted Her To Be
By Sherrie Miranda
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This review is from: Do With Me What You Will (Hardcover)
Although JCO is one of my favorite authors, this book took me, literally, years to finish. As a couple reviewers said, it is the story of Elena Howe coming to an understanding of who she is. But Elena HOWE comes later in the novel. If my memory serves me correctly, Elena is kidnapped by her father and kept like his secret treasure. Years later, she gets away from him, only to have her mother tell her what to do and how to be.
That is how she becomes Mrs. Howe. In the middle of the novel, Elena is nowhere to be seen. How does a novel have pages of writing (and I'm talking about approx. 100 pages) without the protagonists? I must admit I skipped through some of these pages only to find out later that we were getting to know Elena's future lover, the man who, at the end she leaves her husband for. But does she actually find him? Not according to what I read.
So, I found the book very hard to follow and I set it down several times for that reason. We spent most of our time in Elena's head and Elena had no idea what she thought or who she was. She was basically a lost soul who, according to a couple reviewers, finally figured out who she was at the end. I am not convinced of that.
628 reviews
October 20, 2016
Read this in my early twenties and it's stayed with me for over thirty years. Don't know if it's because it's a great book or whether the things I read back then helped form me. Probably a little of both.
Profile Image for Lily Hoffman.
84 reviews
September 27, 2024
What is this…like why are there like a million unrelated plots…too fleshed out…pointless…odd…I don’t get it.
Profile Image for Dinah.
12 reviews
December 12, 2008
couldn't put this book down!

my first book by JCO.
will read more. I was enthralled by the main character and how she survived throughout all the drama in her life ..a bit stark.. but the author's details of the sorrounding people in Elena's life, made her whole.
Depressing, but true.
Profile Image for Beatrix.
160 reviews9 followers
March 21, 2021
Another book from my heap of mysterious books whose origins and the reasons why they came into my possession I can't recall. I do like JCO, though, she's the author of one of my all-time favorite short stories, so perhaps I did buy this book deliberately at one time. But even if it was so, I sure didn't rush to read it. But now I did.
And I was all the more surprised by how much it gripped me - in the beginning.

The novel starts with a big and very effective in medias res, and then as the story moves on, it's deeply unsettling to see how this young protagonist, Elena, is torn and manipulated all over the place by her parents - both of them freaks in their own way. The first 100 or so pages were so dramatic and stunning that I remember sitting in my bed on the night I started the book, just reading one more chapter and then another one, and already looking forward to waking up early in the morning so that I can read a bit more before work.

But as the days and chapters passed, my interest gradually waned - hard to remain interested in a protagonist who - through hundreds and hundreds of pages - only says "I don't know" and "But I..." Of course, with parents like hers, and with a childhood like hers, I can well imagine why Elena doesn't say more, and I can also imagine why it is Elena's all-time biggest desire to be somewhere safe. Still - there must be a bit more action in such a long novel - it's a story, after all, so something must happen.

At this point, JCO suddenly starts going against all expectation when, around 200+ pages, she begins a brand new story-line, which, sadly, completely failed to interest me. In general, if there's a choice between a personal, intimate, low-key family drama and a more widely historical public drama about civil rights and such, then I'll surely choose the first one. Here, after 200 pages of the first type of drama, JCO suddenly embarks on a story of the second type, and all I can think of: how on earth is this connected to the first big part of the novel?

Lucky enough, after a mere 200+ more pages, the two story-lines finally meet, and from then on, I can concentrate again on the bland and silent protagonist, who - despite her blandness and silence - still interests me much more than the other story-line about hot-shot lawyers and the issues of American civil rights. And in a way, yes, Elena does become a bit more interesting as time passes.

But still - this novel is extremely long (750 pages in my edition) and it doesn't seem to earn the right for so many pages. Perhaps if it were two separate novels, one private and one public, then everyone could decide which one to read. But even then, it could still be shorter, if, for example, JCO didn't feel the need to constantly say everything in three sentences, even though it could easily be said in one (JCO: "XY was thin. XY was thin but strong. He was thin, but he was very strong." Me: "WTF"), then the novel wouldn't be so tortuously long, and, well, it would be better for everyone involved if it weren't.
Profile Image for Philip.
211 reviews
July 31, 2021
Years ago, I decided that I should read Joyce Carol Oates because I felt a kind of connection with her writings. But after the Wonderland Quartet, I began to have misgivings, and I wondered what had drawn me to her in the first place. While reading "Do With Me What You Will," I think I started to understand both what I admire and what I question about her writing.

Her characters are not likeable. How did it take me so long to notice this? Because, I think, the characters have a constant sense of responsibility, and I respect that. They have to take care of their family, or protect themselves from danger, or try to improve society. One of the most important aspects of character development is what the characters care about, and Oates pays attention to that aspect.

As I wrote in my review of "The Da Vinci Code," I think a lot of authors can fit into one of three categories: authors who portray the world the way they want the world to be (Aeschylus), authors who portray the world in a way that thrills or pleases the reader (Sophocles), and authors who try to capture how crazy and terrible the world really is (Euripides). Oates clearly belongs in the third category. Her stories are miserable, confused, and lacking in progression. Characters grow and adapt, but they seldom become better people or learn their place in the world. A certain hollowness rings in the encounters between different characters, or between characters and their surroundings. They clash and they don't understand each other. Oates will fill up pages with descriptions of nature, or architecture, or parties, and I feel as though these descriptions serve no purpose except to show us a context that actually means nothing to the protagonist of the scene, it is an extravagant emptiness that only isolates the person rather than engages that person. Again, this technique both intrigues and bothers me: I often feel a disconnect with my environment and I can relate to a character who feels the same way, but ideally an author should construct settings and characters that connect to one another so that the story flows more smoothly. Aeschylus strove for this, and Sophocles sometimes managed it, but Euripides? No, Euripides was not telling a story for the sake of a story. He wanted to show us how reality differed from our expectations.

The characters often veer in a single direction, imminently, tragically. At the very end of this novel Elena does something, "not know why she was doing it but knowing only that she would do it, that she must." Is it a theme in Oates's works, that her characters do not have a choice as to what they will become? Oates has described herself as an atheist but I detect some deism in her character arcs, a predetermined path that usually leads to disaster, as if someone or something set them in motion and decided their destiny in advance. Why do they do what they do? What is their motivation? Usually the desire for prosperity, or belonging. Yet can they ever achieve these things?

"Do With Me What You Will" begins with a kidnapping, leads to a murder, evolves into adultery, and eventually focuses on a love triangle in which a young woman is caught between two lawyers who desperately love her. Elena is a snow queen, a self-imposed mask of innocence who seldom reacts to anything. Jack later remarks to her, "You're such a virgin, a sweet perpetual virgin! You're so perfect that you turn other people hard as ice, like you...and then you feel nothing, nothing!" Both her husband and her lover take pride in their ability to defend guilty people, and have trouble relating to innocent people; as a result, they both see the "pure" Elena as an exceptional person, perhaps even a means of salvation. Her husband Marvin states that everyone is innocent, until the law finds them guilty, but even to him Elena seems so "untouched," such an outsider, that he feels that she can redeem him. And her lover, Jack, the son of a murderer, has devoted himself to defending the downtrodden and disadvantaged but he "needs" Elena, he needs such an innocent person where the law has failed him - the law that he trusts so much, yet it does not improve the world the way he needs it to.

And so Jack breaks the law by committing adultery, sleeping with Elena, and they come at each other compulsively: "How raw and crazy was her need for him, a murderous need!-she was desperate to keep him there, with her, she would have gone mad if somehow he escaped her. They struggled together like two creatures in a frenzy to come completely together, to become one thing, as if the awful burden of holding the universe together were theirs." And here is where I get a glimpse of both Oates's atheism and her pessimism: this image of two human beings, who carry the "burden of holding the universe together." These frenzied, selfish young people, holding the universe together? No wonder everything's in such piss-poor shape! In contrast to the two of them we see Mered Dawe, a hippie who acts as though we are all in danger unless we can find a way to connect with one another. Jack represents Dawe as his attorney in a courtroom, but we know Jack does not believe in Dawe's philosophy. Jack believes in the Law, and when that fails, he believes in himself.

Jack's father was once on trial for murder. After becoming a lawyer himself, Jack tries to make sense of the world by trusting in the cold rationality of the law. Elena's father was, similarly, a criminal of sorts; but then, raised mostly by her mother, Elena was brought up to be a model, a person who enchants the imagination with the appearance of perfection. Jack can only manage an unrewarding career as a defense attorney for the lower class, and Elena becomes the trophy wife of the rich and out-of-touch lawyer Marvin Howe. Maybe I can't label them both as "failures," but neither of them has found much satisfaction in life. And then the two meet, and the dam breaks.

I think this is the most convincing romance I have read so far by Oates. Both Elena and Jack seek a return to innocence in each other; Jack is drawn to Elena's childish purity, and Elena is moved by Jack's candid confession that he needs her. Neither will find a connection to the rest of the world this way. They will never be able to "hold the universe together" but they feel as if they could (or at least they ought to try). This misguided endeavor to hold the burden of the entire world, without really understanding the world or sympathizing with it - this is vintage Joyce Carol Oates. Like Steven Revere, like Jesse Vogel, Jack and Elena try to make sense of the world but grow frustrated when things don't work out. However, instead of rebelling against society, Jack and Elena become increasingly dependent on each other. Call it sweet, or cowardly, but their attraction is mutually strong.

And this book was not perfect. It was too long, with painfully irrelevant passages that only highlighted how entirely the characters misunderstood each other. As with "them," we get strange, almost nightmarish sex scenes that Oates repeats to the point of grotesquery. Characters continually go through the motions of everyday life, and we can almost hear the emotional gears grinding against each other, as the charade tortures the characters who would rather escape this world and leave it to crumble.

"Do With Me What You Will" is a chore to read, and it carries on a lot of the cumbersome awkwardness of her earlier novels. But upon finishing it I found it strangely well-realized, like a slow-acting vitamin that infused me with strength. If this was her first stab at romance, it's a good start.
286 reviews7 followers
September 28, 2020
Of the seven novels by Joyce Carol Oates that I have read so far, this is the one that I enjoyed the least. Which is ironic, given that this was the novel that first made me aware of her. I'm glad that I didn't read it until now; had I read it when it was first published, I might not have picked up another of her novels.

To use Henry James' characterization of War and Peace, this is a "loose, baggy monster" of a novel. Oates herself seemed to sense this; she titled the second part of the book "Miscellaneous Facts, Events, Fantasies, Evidence Admissible and Inadmissible". The novel centers around Elena Howe, and in particular her relationship to four people: in order, her divorced father and mother, her husband, and her lover. Both her husband and her lover are lawyers, so the legal profession gets a lot of attention throughout the book.

Elena herself is described as strikingly beautiful, almost mesmerizing to men. But on the inside, she is practically a cypher, influenced and driven by the aforementioned people in her life. As with the legal pleading of nolo contendere, she takes the position of do with me what you will. She practically sleep walks through life, other than the occasional (finally!) assertion of her will. As I was reading, in my mind I kept hearing Cher's voice in Moonstruck saying "Snap out of it!"

To be frank, not a single one of the primary characters in this novel is very sympathetic. I just don't get this novel; maybe it's me, but I finished the book with the feeling of "meh".

However, I haven't given up on Oates. I already have another novel ready to read.
Profile Image for thuys.
282 reviews80 followers
Read
May 10, 2020
Bản tiếng Việt chia thành 2 quyển. Đọc nửa quyển 1 đã định bỏ ngang nhưng chuyện luật pháp tội ác lại lôi kéo nên đọc tới hết, đúng quãng hai anh chị gặp nhau. Quyển 2 thôi yêu đương làm sao xin hẹn khi nào rảnh đọc sau.
Profile Image for Dominique.
96 reviews8 followers
March 28, 2020
Took me a year to finish and it is just not good
765 reviews48 followers
February 11, 2020
The book starts strong: it is 1950, and a desperate, alcoholic, somewhat deranged dad kidnaps his young daughter Elena from her school. He takes her across the country, sending taunting letters to her mother. Despite telling her that she is worth dying for, he neglects her, and she is found and returned to her mother. However, this early momentum is not sustained, and the plot quickly bogs down into opaque meaninglessness. The book flap states that Oates intent was an exploration of tradition/law vs love/emotion. Love as "violent, unstoppable" can change the men (and women) behind American law and order. Marking points in the book where characters discussed these topics overtly, I tried to piece it together, but Elena herself gets in the way.

Elena is the most frustrating and unsympathetic of characters. She has *no* personality and practically zero self will. She lacks feelings and general human emotion - and the reader is meant to take her as the model or source of love, the kind of love that can facilitate change? She takes classes and seems to blend in academically, so I don't think we're meant to think that she is mentally handicapped (although I'm convinced there is something seriously wrong with her). She is doll-meets-robot. All she wants is for people to love her; she doesn't want to make them upset; she tells them whatever they want to hear. She literally loves her husband because...get this...he loves her!! She has no friends, she cannot hold a conversation, she is anti-heroic, anti-protagonist. She is a blank; I've never read anything like it. She has almost no thoughts of her own (her thoughts are in italics in the book - I imagined that she would grow as a character, and the italic sections would come into their own, but no such luck). Like a character out of a fairy tale, she is extremely beautiful, almost inhumanly so, and this makes people crazy. Men lust after her and want her for their own, as a possession, like a doll on a shelf they can dress up and prop up on their arm at parties; her own mother capitalizes on this beauty while keeping her separate, secluded. Her mother and father are socially different, outliers, and maybe Elena is the natural genetic result? Her mother Ardis Carter/Ardis Ross/Bonita/Marya Sharp changes names and appearance to the point that Elena often cannot recognize her own mother! At the end, in some hurried semblance of conclusion, we're meant to believe the Elena makes a choice! Her very first choice! Wow! Hallelujah! (Read: Put the book in the Goodwill pile and slap yourself for reading the book until the last page).

Easily the weakest of all the JCO books I've read; it was torture to get through.
Profile Image for Robin.
47 reviews
August 17, 2021
This book helped me end a disfiguring relationship and never look back. I love how Elena learns how to go after what she wants. I identified so strongly with her character. The middle part, part 2, is hard to stay with at times, but worth it.
Profile Image for Janet.
321 reviews
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October 11, 2011
Don't really remember it but I know I've read this book. Probably should reread after I finish the Wonderland quartet.
Profile Image for Maria Copeland.
1 review14 followers
June 5, 2015
The character of Elena has haunted me for years. Wonderful exploration of PTSD and mental illness colliding with gradual self-awareness.
Profile Image for Fran.
889 reviews15 followers
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January 7, 2017
I can't even rate this. I called it the Book From Hell. Should have given up, but in my youth I read everything I started. Hundreds of pages of....nothing.
Profile Image for Bamboozlepig.
865 reviews5 followers
March 5, 2021
Whatever JCO is smoking, I think she should share with the rest of us. Maybe then her novels would make sense.

This one started off okay. I didn't cotton to Elena's character because she was way too passive and just drifted through the plot, but the beginning where her father kidnaps her is an interesting start to the book. But it goes downhill from there.

Elena just drifts. She drifts through life with her mom. She doesn't put up a fight when her mom essentially sells her into marriage with an older man. She just exists as a paper doll for JCO to move around from scene to scene.

And the hinkiness that is common to JCO's novels started rearing its head in the chapter that was in 1st person narration and from the POV of what is apparently a homosexual character in bed with another character. That threw me a bit because the rest of the novel is in 3rd person, so the sudden shift in POV and narration felt really out of place. The POV character is not named, so you're left wondering who the hell it is.

Then the first half of the book ends and it segues into a courtroom drama. That part was very dry and boring and I lost interest. I guess Elena takes a lover or something, and probably the character in the 1st person POV chapter is revealed, but holy frickin' hell this just draaaaaaaaaagged on and on and on and on...

I keep trying JCO's books because I keep thinking maybe I'm just not reading the right one, but after this one I think I'm calling it quits.
144 reviews4 followers
November 21, 2024
While there are some terrific moments that capture the quotidian moments of life, and a really excellent set-piece of a courtroom experience perceived by a teenage boy, most of this novel is indirect discourse into the viewpoints of a handful of characters that Oates seems unable to manage efficiently. It's easily over-long by half. On the other hand -- and what is remarkable for such a novel whose essence is "interior" experiences -- I really had a vivid impression of San Francisco,, Monterrey, Maine and, especially, Detroit from the 1950s through the early 1970s.
5 reviews
July 3, 2020
Det största problemet med den här boken är att den är fruktansvärt tråkig.
Jag har, när jag har läst Oates tidigare, uppfattat en del av hennes karaktärer som kraftlösa. Det här är det främsta exemplet. Men Elena, huvudkaraktären, är inte bara handlingsförlamad, hon saknar också helt personlighet. En tabula rasa.
Tyvärr är boken i sin helhet alldeles för långdragen och långrandiga. Karaktärerna är snabbt glömda och handlingen är konstant sirapsseg. Det sämsta jag har läst av Oates.
Profile Image for Behnam Riahi.
58 reviews2 followers
September 12, 2013
The following review has been copied from http://behnamriahi.tumblr.com

Do With Me What You Will, written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Fawcett, is third-person narrative told from the points-of-view of Elena, a former model and trophy wife, and Jack, the son of a murderer who became a lawyer as a result. These two souls are inextricably tied together by Marvin Howe, Elena's husband and the man who got Jack's father off the hook, but they came together of their own, sporadic ambitions and discover love as a result.

Difficult to tell how I came across this book--I suppose the easy answer is that I enjoyed a short story by Joyce Carol Oates (Where Are You Going, Where Have You been?) and I found this at some used book sale. In the last few years, Oates did some interviews for my old college's literary week (Story Week) and all the talk about her had me interested enough to actually read a book eventually. And what a book.

The book is strong for some very interesting, unique reasons: primarily, the minutiae. Though all the little things that Oates describes in every scene don't necessarily add symbolic context, they effectively divert the point-of-view, as if the state-of-mind of the character we're watching the story unfold from is distracting herself to the various objects around her. These details also add to each setting and thus, build every scene a little more. Though they don't all serve the story entirely, they do serve those settings and the characters that perceive them adequately.

In addition to using objects to progress point-of-view, Oates takes different forms to move the story forward--sometimes, she presents plot change with dialogue alone and at other times, she encompasses passing time utilizing collections of instances. Analysis of American law also helps to progress the stories, but simultaneously reveals changes in the characters while educating the audience. There are several things that I didn't know about the law until reading this book and, though I doubt I'll ever need an excuse to look it up via this novel again, it's certainly helped, only the story needs more help than a little help.

As it were, the book has just as many negatives if not more. The pace of the book is very, very slow--much slower than it should be to tell the story that it's about. The use of passive language makes every sentence drag on a little longer than it ought to and the entire book crawls along as a result of it. Perhaps the life-stories of two characters do need to feel long, but there were moments while reading this book where I simply wanted to just stop and read something else. It isn't quite so terribly written as The Justice Riders, for instance, but because of how long the novel feels, it becomes unreadable in itself. With the length of the book set more than 500 pages, it took a while to read as it was. However, each day I read, I felt as if nothing actually happened. The book is peaks and plummets, and while the peaks aren't very high, the plummets, how this book falls away from actually being a moving, engaging story, are severe in their depth. To put it simply, unlike how Ms. Oates would have done, the book is boring.

The turning point is when Elena develops emotions for another man, though she can't believe she's developed these emotions because she's never felt emotions before. Wow, I'm sorry, but the cliche is rife with this one. The crafting of Elena was brilliant--she took a character who had every reason to be broken and made it convincing. The evolution, on the other hand, felt stiff. At the end of the story, I had no idea why she loved Jack or if it was even Jack at all she loved, only that she loved despite her emotionless life up to the point of meeting him. Honestly, Jack isn't even that lovable or interesting to begin with. It felt as phony as every other shocking, surprising love story where a protagonist suddenly discovers a soft side. I've read sex scenes with more love than the love that Elena, Marvin, or Jack supposedly have and, though the value of my love is often brought into question, my perspective about love still defines this as bullshit. Oates convinced us of one thing and in an effort to change it, she slacked off and made the lack of emotional depth make an already exhausting, long book go on longer.

The one thing that drove me to my wit's end with this book was her use of the phrase, "ironic." Jack has ironic eyes, he moves in an ironic way, everything about him from Elena's point of view seems extraordinarily ironic. Let's take a brief intermission to analyze irony:

i·ro·ny1
ˈīrənē,ˈiərnē/
noun
1.
the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.

Sorry, but, Ms. Oates, could you explain one more time how Jack's eyes are ironic? How his entire being seems so ironic? It only takes one misused phrase for the author to lose her audience and Joyce did just that. If only her proofreading skills were as long-winded as her prose. I felt tempted to find the page of Jack's "ironic" descriptions, but, coincidentally, I grew exhausted from merely opening the book again.

The writing is clever, solid in moments, and creative, but droll and otherwise unbelievable. It'll be a great while before Oates and I get back together.
Profile Image for Rae .
446 reviews8 followers
December 13, 2022
3.25/5 stars

While this does have some of the qualities that I like in Oates’s previous novels, this one did take me some time to get into. And like with Expensive People, I wasn’t too attached to the characters.
Profile Image for Cwelshhans.
1,256 reviews1 follower
August 27, 2018
It takes a lot for me to call a book terrible, but this was terrible. And boring.
Profile Image for Sarah Rigg.
1,673 reviews22 followers
September 6, 2019
I'm not 100 percent sure, but this might have been my first Joyce Carol Oates novel. I went on to read quite a few more by her. She's a favorite author.
Profile Image for Amanda.
26 reviews
December 14, 2019
I hae a feeling that there are way more layers of meaning to this. I an't wait to read what others are saying and take part in the disussion.
Profile Image for Miranda.
833 reviews5 followers
January 28, 2024
The ratio of length to engagement was a little lacking. Still amazed that she's still writing, how long her career is is evident on how some of the aspects of this story have aged.
Profile Image for Sandra Öström.
31 reviews
September 16, 2024
Kom aldrig riktigt in i boken. Komplicerad och tung kärlekshistoria som lämnar mig oberörd. Inte en av JCO bästa verk enligt min mening.
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