The Falls
Joyce Carol Oates, 2004
HarperCollins
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780641995507
Summary
It is 1950 and, after a disastrous honeymoon night, Ariah Erskine's young husband throws himself into the roaring waters of Niagara Falls. Ariah, "the Widow Bride of the Falls," begins a relentless seven-day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found.
At her side is confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby, who is unexpectedly drawn to this plain, strange woman. What follows is a passionate love affair, marriage, and family—a seemingly perfect existence. But the tragedy by which they were thrown together begins to shadow them, damaging their idyll with distrust, greed, and even murder.
Set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls in the mid-twentieth century, this haunting exploration of the American family in crisis is, a stunning achievement from an author who, as The Nation says, is "one of the great artistic forces of our time." (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 16, 1938
• Where—Lockport, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Syracuse Univ.; M.A., Univ. of Wisconsin
• Awards—National Book Award for Them, 1970; 14 O. Henry
Awards; six Pushcart Prizes
• Currently—lives in Princeton, New Jersey
Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most influential and important storytellers in the literary world. She has often used her supreme narrative skills to examine the dark side of middle-class Americana, and her oeuvre includes some of the finest examples of modern essays, plays, criticism, and fiction from a vast array of genres. She is still publishing with a speed and consistency of quality nearly unheard of in contemporary literature.
A born storyteller, Oates has been spinning yarns since she was a little girl too young to even write. Instead, she would communicate her stories through drawings and paintings. When she received her very first typewriter at the age of 14, her creative floodgates opened with a torrent. She says she wrote "novel after novel" throughout high school and college— a prolificacy that has continued unabated throughout a professional career that began in 1963 with her first short story collection, By the North Gate.
Oates's breakthrough occurred in 1969 with the publication of Them, a National Book Award winner that established her as a force to be reckoned with. Since that auspicious beginning, she has been nominated for nearly every major literary honor —from the PEN/Faulkner Award to the Pulitzer Prize—and her fiction turns up with regularity on the New York Times annual list of Notable Books.
On average Oates publishes at least one novel, essay anthology, or story collection a year (during the 1970s, she produced at the astonishing rate of two or three books a year!). And although her fiction often exposes the darker side of America's brightest facades—familial unrest, sexual violence, the death of innocence—she has also made successful forays into Gothic novels, suspense, fantasy, and children's literature. As novelist John Barth once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."
Where she finds the time for it no one knows, but Oates manages to combine her ambitious, prolific writing career with teaching: first at the University of Windsor in Canada, then (from 1978 on), at Princeton University in New Jersey. For all her success and fame, her daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast.
Extras
• When not writing, Oates likes to take in a fight. "Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost," she says in highbrow fashion of the lowbrow sport.
• Oates's Black Water, which is a thinly veiled account of Ted Kennedy's car crash in Chappaquiddick, was produced as an opera in the 1990s. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Praise for Oates from the UK
• One of the female frontrunners for the title of Great American Novelist.— Maggie Gee, Sunday Times
• A writer of extraordinary strengths...she has dealt consistently with what is probably the great American theme— the quest for the creation of self...Her great subject, naturally, is love.—Ian Sansom, Guardian
• Her prose is peerless and her ability to make you think as she re-invents genres is unique. Few writers move so effortlessly from the gothic tale to the psychological thriller to the epic family saga to the lyrical novella. Even fewer authors can so compellingly and entertainingly tell a story.—Jackie McGlone, Scotland on Sunday
• Novelists such as John Updike, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer slug it out for the title of the Great American Novelist. But maybe they're wrong. Maybe, just maybe, the Great American Novelist is a woman. —The Herald
Book Reviews
At her best, as in the middle section of The Falls, she's like a contemporary Dreiser, both in her slovenliness and in her power. After 40 years and millions of words, Joyce Carol Oates remains implacable, unstoppable, and if she isn't truly a force of nature that's only because, as in any long relationship between a writer and her audience, there's not much mystery left.
Terrance Rafferty - New York Times
At her best, as in the middle section of The Falls, she's like a contemporary Dreiser, both in her slovenliness and in her power. After 40 years and millions of words, Joyce Carol Oates remains implacable, unstoppable, and if she isn't truly a force of nature that's only because, as in any long relationship between a writer and her audience, there's not much mystery left.
Jane Ciabattari - Washington Post
Oates is not only on her authentically rendered home ground in this sprawling novel set in the city of Niagara Falls during the 1950s, she is also writing at the top of her form. Her febrile prose is especially appropriate to a story as turbulent as the tumultuous waters that have claimed many lives over the years. Widowed on her wedding night when her new husband, a young minister and latent homosexual, throws himself into the falls, Ariah Littrell, the plain, awkward daughter of a minister, henceforth considers herself damned. Her bleak future becomes miraculously bright when Dirk Burnaby, a handsome, wealthy bon vivant with an altruistic heart, falls in love with the media-dubbed Widow-Bride. Their rapturous happiness is shadowed only by Ariah's illogical conviction over the years that Dirk will leave her and their three children someday. Her unreasonable fear becomes self-fulfilling when her increasingly unstable behavior, combined with Dirk's obsessed but chaste involvement with Nina Olshaker, a young mother who enlists his help in alerting the city fathers to the pestilential conditions in the area later to be known as Love Canal, opens a chasm in their marriage. His gentle heart inspired by a need for justice, Dirk takes on the powerful, corrupt politicians, his former peers and pals, in a disastrous lawsuit that ruins him socially and financially and results in his death. Oates adroitly addresses the material of this "first" class action lawsuit and makes the story fresh and immediate. "In the end, all drama is about family," a character muses, and while the narrative occasionally lapses into melodrama in elucidating this theme, Oates spins a haunting story in which nature and humans are equally rapacious and self-destructive.
Publishers Weekly
The author of more than 30 books, Oates returns to her We Were the Mulvaneys theme of a family torn apart by external events. When Ariah's new husband, Erskine, throws himself into Niagara Falls on the first day of their honeymoon, she endures a seven-day vigil as she awaits the recovery of his body and soon becomes known as the Widow Bride of the Falls. Enter Dirk Burnaby, a local playboy lawyer, who falls in love with Ariah and marries her a month later. Their life goes well, with the birth of two sons and a daughter, but when Dirk takes on what would later be known as the Love Canal lawsuit, his long hours, the rumor of an affair, and the animosity of the community lead to estrangement from his family and then his death. Sixteen years later, we meet Ariah's children, who know nothing of Ariah's past as the Widow Bride; they have known only that the community has ridiculed them inexplicably. Through the discovery of their complicated history, all three children find direction. Oates uses the falls metaphor to powerful effect, dramatizing how our lives can get swept up by forces beyond our control. Highly recommended. —Joshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY
Library Journal
From Oates' fevered imagination comes a sprawling, ambitious novel with enough material to fill several books.... This passionate, compulsively readable novel displays the full range of Oates' singular obsessions—the destructiveness of secrets; eccentric female characters given to rapacious appetites and volatile emotions; and the mysterious way that human emotion is mirrored in the natural world. Vivid and memorable reading from the madly prolific Oates. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist
The Falls reads like a 19th-century epic, with echoes of the gothic. Some critics saw this approach as melodramatic; others called it sublime.... While the plot may grip some readers, the book will likely appeal to those who enjoy depth of character development, interesting (if, at times, overdone) prose, and a brave, brave ending.
Bookmarks Magazine
Oates painstakingly examines the impulse toward self-destruction-and the ways we find to heal ourselves. The story spans nearly 30 years, beginning in 1950 when newlywed Gilbert Erskine leaps into Niagara Falls to his death, forever traumatizing his bride Ariah, a "spinster" music teacher who had awkwardly stumbled into a marriage neither spouse wanted. The hallucinatory opening section traces Ariah's growing embitterment while introducing young attorney Dirk Burnaby, who impulsively comforts "the Widow-Bride of The Falls," just as impulsively proposes a year after Gilbert's demise-and is accepted. The Burnabys settle in Niagara Falls, produce three children, and keep their often volatile marriage together (despite Ariah's emotional instability and paranoia) until Dirk, moved by the passionate activism of a woman whose family is victimized by environmental poisoning, undertakes the first (1962) lawsuit against the chemical company that had dumped pollutants into Love Canal. The suit is dismissed, Dirk's high standing in the community is destroyed, and his suspicious death pushes Ariah deeper into withdrawal and resentment. The narrative then focuses in turns on her children. Scholarly, introverted Chandler, who has long known he is his mother's firstborn but not her favorite, becomes a science teacher, and eventually the dogged pursuer of the buried facts about his father's obsession and fate. "Golden Boy" Royall struggles to escape the burdens of being loved too easily and achieving too little. And their sister Juliet, who inherits Ariah's musical gifts, must resist a deathward momentum given stunning metaphoric form in the Burnaby family story of a daredevil tightrope walker, and the beckoning "voices" that seem to speak from within the roaring waters of the Falls. This big, enthralling novel recaptures the gift for Dreiserian realism that distinguishes such Oates triumphs as Them, What I Lived For, and We Were the Mulvaneys. It's her best ever—and a masterpiece.
Kirkus Reviews UK
Discussion Questions
1. Compare Ariah's respective relationships with Gilbert and Dirk, and her reasons for marrying each man.
2. Ariah is deeply impacted by her brief marriage to Gilbert -- their lack of love for one another, their disastrous wedding night, his suicide. How do the physical and psychological circumstances of her first marriage echo throughout her marriage to Dirk?
3. What attracts Dirk to Ariah when he meets her during her seven-day vigil at The Falls? If they had met under different circumstances would Dirk have fallen in love with her?
4. In the days before Gilbert's body is recovered, Ariah "refused to behave as others wished her to behave." In what others ways throughout the story does she defy society's conventions and her family's expectations?
5. Chart the unraveling of Dirk and Ariah's relationship. Is there a specific moment when they begin to grow apart, or is it a gradual process? Is one more at fault than the other?
6. After months of avoiding Nina Olshaker, what motivates Dirk to take her case? Why does he continue the case even when it begins to jeopardize his marriage, his professional standing, his livelihood, and his friendships?
7. What is your opinion of Ariah as a mother, both before and after Dirk's death? Describe her relationship with each child and how it relates to the family as a whole. In what ways is each of Ariah's children similar to -- and different from -- her?
8. Why do you suppose Ariah chose to remain in Niagara Falls after Dirk's death, a place that had claimed the lives of her two husbands?
9. Chandler, Royall, and Juliet each feel compelled to find out the circumstances surrounding their father's death. What drives each one to go on such a quest, and what is gained by it?
10. Discuss the many references to suicide -- including Gilbert's death, Juliet's attempt, and the story of the dairy maid -- and their significance in the story.
11. Why does the family decide to hold a memorial service for Dirk nearly two decades after this death? Why does Ariah at first refuse to attend and then change her mind?
12. What is Joyce Carol Oates saying about the nature of families in The Falls? Are the Burnabys a typical family?
(Questions issued by publishers.)
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