Rating: 
Summary: Because its bitter....
Review: The best book by America's best author- indeed my favorite book. As someone who has read a great many books about race relations in the United States, this is by far the best - Ms. Oates abilities in understanding human nature, capturing the human soul, and critiquing American culture are put to fine use. Moving and gripping.
Rating: 
Summary: The title wasn't stolen
Review: This book was ok. I bought it because the title was a direct quote from a stephen crane poem. Why no attribution anywhere to crane?
I guarantee less than 1% of Americans could attribute the quote. If you search the web now on "Because is is bitter.." you'll get Joyce Carol Oats 90% of the time. BOGUS. She robs Crane and gets away with it.
Rating:
Summary: One of Oates's best
Review: This gripping, powerful novel is one of the best Joyce Carol Oates has written -- and that's saying a lot, since she has published about 30 novels, some of them as good as anything by an American in the last fifty years (and, to be honest, some of them as bad).You can read the novel simply to become absorbed in the events and characters, or you can read it as a study of morality, of the implications of race and gender, of violence and American dreams. I've read it three times, and each time I have come away more impressed with Oates's achievement. This is a stunningly vivid work -- her command of English prose here is at a level reached with her earlier realistic novels, Wonderland and them. Give yourself over to the writing, and you will truly feel every page of this book. A warning, though: It's not an uplifting story, despite an ostensibly happy ending. The characters suffer, and the world they inhabit is brutal and unforgiving. But the pain is not without meaning, and moments in this story reach heights of tragedy which few American writers have scaled. Even if you've hated things you've by Joyce Carol Oates in the past, don't dismiss this novel. It will dig itself into your consciousness.
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