Little Bird of Heaven
Joyce Carol Oates, 2009
HarperCollins
442 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061829840
Summary
Joyce Carol Oates returns with a dark, romantic, and captivating tale, set in the Great Lakes region of upstate New York.
Set in the mythical small city of Sparta, New York, this searing, vividly rendered exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late-twentieth-century America returns to the emotional and geographical terrain of acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates's previous bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger's Daughter.
When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects, her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her longtime lover, Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers' son, Aaron, and Eddy Diehl's daughter, Krista, become obsessed with each other, each believing the other's father is guilty.
Told in halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is a classic Oates novel in which the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty. By the novel's end, the fated lovers, meeting again as adults, are at last ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy of guilt, misplaced love, and redemptive yearning. (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.
• In 2001, Oprah Winfrey selected Oates's novel We Were the Mulvaneys for her Book Club. (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
Little Bird of Heaven starts with the urgency of a thriller, then turns into something more existential as the years (and pages) go by with no developments in the case. This is a tragedy on a classical scale. Oates more than winks at the Greeks by naming the town Sparta, the murdered woman Zoe (which means "life"). Like the original Spartans, these people are stuck in a world where physicality dominates and runs violent... Oates has been chided for a tendency toward melodrama, and the emotions in Little Bird of Heaven are definitely intense. Krista often sounds florid. But melodrama is a valid tool, one the Greeks used as well to dramatize the height of passion. In real melodrama, there's a stark line between villains and innocents. In this novel, it's not that straightforward. Oates has written a feminist novel with empathy for men, especially men without power, with no voice besides violenc.
Malena Watrous - New York Times
This is a powerful novel. Oates's feel for the rhythms of hardscrabble life and its sour mix of alcoholism, suicide, drug abuse, adultery and murder is as keen as ever. In Sparta she has created a fictional universe to stand beside Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or Cheever's Shady Hill. Her descriptions of the geography of urban decay—the rusted bridges, tangled back alleys and trash-strewn lots—are as vivid as any naturalist's portrayal of more felicitous scenes. Her unsentimental language makes a high-lonesome kind of poetry out of otherwise sordid and unremarkable circumstance.
Michael Lindgren - Washington Post
[This novel]...has an unnerving clarity about the power of sexual desire...it cleaves to the mind like a strong memory, and after you've read it, you may find yourself dreaming about the imaginary town of Sparta, and wondering what the people are doing now.
Chicago Sun Times
Beneath the Sturm und Drang of Oates's third book of 2009 is the archetypal fairy tale: beauty and the beast. The beauties are the narrator, Krista Diehl, and Zoe Kruller, a waitress and singer who was murdered in Sparta, N.Y., in 1983. The beasts are the men, most notably Krista's father, Eddy, who, as Zoe's lover, is suspected in her murder, and Aaron Kruller, who discovers his mother's body and grows up repressing the thought that his father might have killed her. While the women are torn between attraction to the men and the need to escape them, the men must eventually be blooded, psychically and, in Eddy's case, physically. Eddy starts out a predator, with “tufts of animal-hair” sticking out of his undershirt, and ends up at the wrong end of a barrage of police bullets. While Zoe's murder and Eddy's suicide-by-cop five years later are the story's anchors, the heart of this novel is how Krista and Aaron are drawn together, however briefly. Oates unfolds the central gothic intuition—that beauty and the beast are complements—in a way that Charlotte Bronte would highly approve.
Publishers Weekly
Oates once again takes us to deteriorating upstate New York, this time the city of Sparta, where, as in We Were the Mulvanys, a tragic incident has devastating effects on two families. When Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, suspicion falls on husband Delray and on lover Eddy Diehl. Neither man is arrested, but each is forced to live under a veil of continued suspicion. In this story, it's the children who suffer the most, and they also narrate: first Eddy's daughter Krista and then Delray's son Aaron. Eddy separates from his wife and family and leaves Sparta, but Krista believes in her father's innocence, recounting life before and after the crime and offering her recollections of Zoe. Aaron recounts finding his mother's body and the bitterness of living with such notoriety. In typical Oates irony, Krista develops a crush on Aaron, climaxing in a deeply emotional scene; 15 years later they find out who killed Zoe. VERDICT Not Oates's best work, but her readers will find the psychological suspense combined with tragedy and redemption a good read. Josh Cohen Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY
Library Journal
Typically overstuffed chronicle of sexual violence and family implosion, closest in kinship within the author's family of novels to We Were the Mulvaneys (1996) and You Must Remember This (1987). En route to challenging Balzac's lifetime stats, Oates is now somewhere in Trollope territory with her 36th novel and third book-length fiction published in 2009. She divides this one between the narrative of Krista Diehl, passionately adoring daughter of Eddie, a known adulterer and suspected murderer, and the story of Aaron Kruller, the part-Native American son of the murdered woman. Zoe Kruller, Eddie's mistress before he was accused of killing her, was a seductive, reputedly round-heeled waitress and aspiring band singer; the title alludes to a gritty country-and-western ballad. Oates succeeds best when depicting downbeat real life and sentimental dreams of something better in the fictional upstate hamlet of Sparta, N.Y. But boastful, hair-trigger-tempered Eddie, his spiteful, betrayed wife Lucille and Krista's sullen older brother Ben are all recycled from earlier books, and Krista's emotional defense of her doting daddy is as devoid of conviction or resonance as it is creepy. When Oates shifts to Aaron's story, however, the book starts to fly. The misshapen product of unconscionable parenting and a racist environment, Aaron seethes with an I'll-get-those-bastards fury that all but burns holes in the pages. This small-town Caliban, a hound of hell powered by unquenchable rage and vindictiveness, is one of Oates's most unforgettable characters. If only Krista's bloated narrative had had one-tenth the concentrated heat of Aaron's seemingly foreordained decline and fall. One-half of a masterpiece.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Little Bird of Heaven:
1. With whose narrative voice in the novel, Krista's or Aaron's, do you most sympathasize? Is one more trustworthy than the other?
2. Why is Krista so supported of, enamored with her father—and so certain he is not the killer of Zoe?
3. Did you at one time suspect one of the fathers over the other, say, Eddie over Delray, or vice versa? When the murder is finally found, were you suprised?
4. But the story is not really about the murder, or even solving it. The point of the story is the stain of sin and violence that befalls the children of Eddie and Zoe. In a sense, Krista and Aaron are almost as much victims as Zoe was. In what ways are the two shaped by the murder; how does the tragedy come to define their lives? How might Aaron's life, for instance, have been different had his mother lived?
5. What underlies the passion, or compulsion, that propels the two young people together, even if only briefly?
6. What finally makes Krista realize, at the end, that even though their attraction is as powerful as ever, she realizes she cannot be with him?
7. In this, as in many of her works, Oates is concerned with the relationship of passion and violence. How does that play out in Little Bird of Heaven?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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