From Booklist
After her lavishly imagined, supernatural historical novel, The Accursed (2013), Oates turns in the latest of her intensely magnified studies of a family in crisis and the agony of a misfit girl. Zeno Mayfield, a former mayor of the small Adirondack town of Carthage, and his wife, Arlette, have two daughters. Juliet is as good as she is beautiful. Cressida is “difficult.” Smart, spiky, gnomish, and artistic, “inky-frizzy haired” Cressida may be autistic. Sweet Juliet gets engaged to handsome, civic-minded Brett Kincaid, who promptly enlists after 9/11. He returns severely injured, horribly scarred, and deeply traumatized. Then Cressida disappears, and grief decimates her loving family. Flashbacks to Brett’s hellish experiences in Iraq carry a powerful indictment of war crimes, while a harrowing visit to a maximum-security prison by an enigmatic investigative writer exposes the horrors of incarceration and capital punishment. Oates’ eerie, plangent, and gripping tale of a missing 19-year-old outcast and a betrayed warrior pivots on her interpretations of Cressida’s medieval namesake, who abandoned one soldier for another, and Zeno’s paradox concerning “infinity within the finite” as “a state of perpetual yearning.” HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Oates will stay in the spotlight as The Accursed comes out in paperback, and Carthage is vigorously promoted in all media formats. --Donna Seaman
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Review
“Knotted, tense, digressive and brilliant.” (Kirkus Reviews (starred review))
Oates (The Accursed) returns with another novel that ratchets up the unsettling to her signature feverish pitch… Once again, Oates’s gift for exposing the frailty--and selfishness--of humans is on display. (Publishers Weekly (starred review))
“After her lavishly imagined, supernatural historical novel, The Accursed (2013), Oates turns in the latest of her intensely magnified studies of a family in crisis and the agony of a misfit girl.” (Booklist)
“Joyce Carol Oates has outdone herself.” (NPR)
“Joyce Carol Oates is known for richly detailed portraits of American families asunder. CARTHAGE is a stunning contribution to her storied canon.” (Kirkus)
“…Oates shows how perilous it is to assign guilt, and how hard it is to draw the line between victim and perpetrator in a blurred moral landscape in which every crime, on the battlefield or on the home front, is a crime of conscience.” (New York Times Book Review)
“For pages on end it is a compelling mediation on belief, betrayal, and grief. Oates has written a good book. I’d recommend it. What does it matter if it is or is not a war novel. The best war novels aren’t war novels at all. They become something bigger.” (Daily Beast)
“…brilliant…amazing…. A compassionate tenderness suffuses the final sections of the book, as palpable as the cold irony with which the book begins. It’s a breathtaking effect…” (Washington Post)
“Oates, working at the top of her formidable game, handily won over more of our readers with this raw, suspenseful, ‘real and immersive’ stream-of-consciousness tale.” (Elle, Lettres 2014 Readers Prize)
“a well-told tale of family, grief and faith” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
“Irresistible page-turner and heady intellectual experience… Oates continues to make her mark as one of the greatest American writers of our time.” (Minneapolis Star Tribune)
“Emphatically and artfully explores the subject of physical and emotional distances between loved ones, the various expanses between who individuals are, were, or could be, and the often barely perceptible gaps between guilt and innocence.” (Philadelphia Inquirer)
“…one of America’s greatest writers…” (Roanoke Times)
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