Beasts

Rating:
Summary: delicious morsel of a story
Review: <i>Beasts</i> is a short, brisk read, but is no longer than it needs to be to tell the story it sets out to tell. Interest in every character is satisfied, and each aspect of the tell is explored in rich detail, with wonderful prose that I hope carries through the next Oates book I pick up (and I hope to pick one up soon). The tale of the insecure college girl seduced into a professor's dark, twisted fantasy world has been explored before, but Ms. Oates performs the investigation with a beautiful, heartbreaking style that I really admire. I regret putting off reading her works for so long!

Rating:
Summary: delicious morsel of a story
Review: Beasts is a short, brisk read, but is no longer than it needs to be to tell the story it sets out to tell. Interest in every character is satisfied, and each aspect of the tell is explored in rich detail, with wonderful prose that I hope carries through the next Oates book I pick up (and I hope to pick one up soon). The tale of the insecure college girl seduced into a professor's dark, twisted fantasy world has been explored before, but Ms. Oates performs the investigation with a beautiful, heartbreaking style that I really admire. I regret putting off reading her works for so long!

Rating:
Summary: Led me to sin...
Review: Beasts crept up on me, then carried me off in its evil little teeth. Did it REALLY lead me to sin? Oh yes. Grievously. In fact, I was so anxious to see what happened next, I caught myself stealing a few sentences while driving. (Well, I HAD stopped for a red light.)

The story is not new: A college student with a professorial crush learns all about the relativity of morality--and learns it the hard way. So what makes this version of an old standard so good?

Form? Breaks every rule, yet works. Flashbacks within flashbacks, yet you can't wait for the next page.

Plot? Straightforward, yet masterful. (Check out the delicious twist at the end of the third chapter!) Builds with understatement, until you're screaming for the resolution. You get what you scream for, too. Satisfaction.

Characterization? Yes! The naivete of the protagonist balanced by the perspective of her mature counterpart. Whom you don't trust. At first. Brilliant! No indulgent and annoying digressions into secondary characters, either.

If you like subtle psychological thrillers and can live without gunshots and fistfights for a couple of hours (well, there is a knife), this book will become one of your favorites.

Rating:
Summary: Carved Lives
Review: Beasts is a gothic novella set in a small New England woman's college in the 70s. It is told through the perspective of Gillian Brauer, a yearning student poet who is infatuated with her D. H. Lawrence loving professor Andre Harrow and his controversial and mysterious sculptress wife, Dorcas. Several mysteries including recurring acts of arson, a coveted but secret apprenticeship to the radical Dorcas and several students who are debilitated by mental illness are balanced through the book. The characters explore the moral boundary of the liberal time period through their sexual explorations, but this isn't a novella that seeks to exploit the titillating age of free love. Rather, it reinvents the tale of Bluebeard to create a contemporary fable of the grotesque.

This novella explores the deadly consequences of a train of thought taken too far, viciously seeking out the passionate ends of extended thoughts. Harrow and his wife take the liberal sexual attitude of DH Lawrence and act out the extreme barriers of it. Gillian enigmatically buries her responsibility in the events of her early life while simultaneously plotting the motives which form her guilt. Somehow she is left centrally pure, a passionate girl spoiled by ideas. Oates draws out the violent inner natures of her characters to show them in the light, exposing the consequences of their nature. This novella isn't subtle, Oates chooses instead to go for the extreme to show us our forgotten nightmares. It is a powerful and memorable read.

Rating:
Summary: New Form, with Quirks
Review: Beasts is the first novella that I've read by Joyce Carol Oates, and I was both discouraged and haunted after reading it. The book's premise, focusing on Gillian Brauer's obession with her professor and the twisted, bizarre relationship with him and his wife, is original. Oates does a terrific job at developing her central character, a prodigious feat in such a compact, dense genre of the novella. The plot line is engaging, as is the mysterious, liberal character of Harrow. Still, the book has its deficiencies. For example, I was dismayed not to find out more about Harrow and his wife- their past, their experiences with the other students, and what started them down such a convoluted, sordid trail of lust and debasement. ALso, Oates does not flesh out Gillian's relationships with the other characters, and she does not conclude the book decisively. That is, it would have been great to have a fuller delineation of Gillian's reflections about her college days. Still, this book was engaging, haunting, and memorable. Like Oates's previous books and short stories, Beasts is an uncanny, jarring exploration of the human psyche.

Rating:
Summary: Arson and Obsession In the Berkshires
Review: Donna Tart's "A Secret History", Thomas H. Cook's "A Chatam School Affair" and now, the 2002 release of Joyce Carol Oate's "Beasts" are, similarly, tales of students obsessed with their charismatic instuctors. The fact that all three of these books are set in idyllic New England school towns, makes one wonder why more students attending those east coast colleges, aren't sipping Evian, instead of relying on the local water supply. It is a college town in the Massachusetts Berkshires that provides the setting for "Beasts", which is at once, a stylish noir mystery, an erotically charged gothic fable and a meditation on limitations of ethical boundaries. I will not get involved in any plot rehashes, but the three central characters are; Andre Harrow, a Svengali-like professor; Dorcas, an annoyingly eccentric avant garde sculptor of grotesque wooden totems; and Gillian Brauer a willful student, who makes Harrow the object of her passion. Around these characters, Oates weaves a tense, claustrophopic psychodrama involving arson, sexual exploitation and ultimately murder. Oates has proven to be an adroit master of the novella, which is enjoying a brisk revival in these attention span challenged times. The beautiful Henri Fuseli painting on the dust cover and the high quality paper stock on this slender Carroll and Graf edition are icing on the cake.

Rating:
Summary: The world of academia?
Review: I was riveted by this story of a misfit trying to succeed in a world totally foreign to her. Oates is a master at the surprise ending, and she ties the events of this story together well as she does what she does best -- analyzing human motivations.

Rating:
Summary: What was the famous author thinking?
Review: If you want to read a short novel about sexual obsession with a tragic ending, during which the reader actually does come to care about the characters and understand them, even if "liking" them is difficult, read "Damage" by Josephine Hart (or at least see the movie version, although the book is more powerful.) Don't spend hard-earned cash on "Beasts" by Professor Oates. Her characters are cartoonish and shallow and have nothing to say or do that is interesting. Her heroine is mousy and unlikeable, and her villains are bores, not credible as a married couple that a naive college girl (or many such) would become fascinated by. This is an "idea" for a novel instead of a realized one. If the writer was a 30-year-old unknown making her debut, perhaps one could say nice things about the effort. But Ms. Oates is by gosh famous and respected, and marketing this tiny, tedious tome should embarrass her. She has released a story which features moral danger and even murder, yet has no suspense or thrills; one which revolves around bisexual, multi-partnered sexual awakening and degradation, yet has no actual sexual scenes written; one which declares that her heroine is a person we should care for and worry about, but fails to compel us to do so. It's the kind of effort that would discourage a beginner from picking up Ms. Oate's other works.

Rating:
Summary: Gothic Theater of the Macabre
Review: In yet another chilling tale of the grotesque and macabre, Joyce thrills her readers with a truly fine psychological tale. Overtly referencing D.H. Lawrence, one of the fathers of the genre, and one of Oates favorite writers, the book leads the reader through the mind of a young college coed, who to one extent or another, becomes lost and obsessed in the world of human feeling and sexuality, even depraved sexuality.

The tale is highly autobiographical, and it is interesting to try and separate the fictional Joyce from the real one. Her love of D.H. Lawrence and literature in general, mixed with the college campus atmosphere with which she is so familiar. The exquisite detail of the anorexic condition which Joyce has been a victim of personally, along with her tachycardia. All these things, combined with emotions portrayed in a manner, that is purely unique to Joyce's work.

Yet, not uncommonly, Joyce ends with the death or murder of some of her characters. This situation is not unusual for her. It is the manner in which the protagonist is drawn to create this conclusion that makes the book so precisely a Joyce Carol Oates novel, or perhaps it should better be called a novella. Running only 138 pages, the book does not give us the extreme level of character development that many of her books do. Yet, somehow, she is able to paint a truly clear and tangible, even palpable feeling of her protagonist and the mental processes that she experiences. Perhaps, drawing heavily on self experiences is the key to her wonderful articulation in such a limited number of words.

For those who are familiar with her work, this book will not be a disappointment. Interestingly, she portrays women as the Beasts here, which is not typical, yet also not atypical of her Gothic style. Even her supporting characters have various, unclean and often nefarious intent. Yet she focuses the reader on the central character, which in many ways, is herself. In her style, she is the undisputed master, and this book is no exception. It is highly recommended for readers of Gothic tales, and any reader of Joyce Carol Oates will find this book one of great illustrative significance.

Rating:
Summary: Yet another almost perfect novel from JCOates.
Review: Joyce Carol Oates, Beasts (Carroll and Graf, 2002)

Joyce Carol Oates cannot be human.

It is simply impossible for a single human being to turn out the work she has over the course of her career, consistently stratospheric in both quality and quantity. Her thirty-year bibliography is so vast that the major internet repository of Oates research and criticism doesn't have a full list anywhere, but is now a searchable database. Another admittedly incomplete bibliography on the web lists eighty-nine books split between novels, short story collections, and poetry, fifteen anthologies she has edited or co-edited, ten works of non-fiction, and ninety anthologies in which her work has appeared since 1980 (and those are only the horror-themed anthologies). She is the Merzbow of literature, the Sun Ra of wordcraft, both the dream and the nightmare of the bibliophile with a limited reserve of cash. The truly astounding part of all this is that one can walk into a (very well-stocked) bookshop, pick up a Joyce Carol Oates book at random, and have an odds-on chance of being rewarded with one of his finest reads of the year. Now add to this idea the fact that Oates is, for all intents and purposes, a one-trick pony, and explain how one person can write so much material on a single theme and still have it come out so very, very well.

Such is certainly the case with her recent novel Beasts. Anyone who's read Oates before, in whatever form, is liable to know a few things about this book even before cracking the cover: the main theme of the book will be human degradation. One of the characters in the book will be horrified by the degradation, even while experiencing it, and this horror will cause the character to commit some sort of extreme and socially unacceptable act. There will be a great deal of uncomfortable eroticism. Then you open the book, read the first two small chapters, and here's something new: Oates is going to tell you all this in the first four pages. It's almost as if she's throwing down the gauntlet to the reader; "you know it's coming, I know it's coming, let's see how much I can give you at the beginning and still beguile you with my novel."

And utterly beguiling it is. Gillian Brauer is a student at a small college in Massachusetts who is enamored of one of her professors. She is not alone in this, but the lengths to which she goes in her obsession with him are rather farther than the others go (in one early scene, she surreptitiously follows his wife through town, and mentions she has done this a number of times before). She knows that sometimes the professor and his wife, a sculptor whose most recent show at the school's gallery has ignited a firestorm of outrage, will sometimes allow students into their inner circle, but that these students are very tight-lipped about what goes on there. Secret society stuff at its best. Gillian, too shy to confess her love for her professor and desire to be one of those students, begins to imagine that all of her housemates in the small house/dormitory where they live, are members of the inner circle, and eventually gets to the point where she must either confront her professor or go crazy.

And that's the light, optimistic part of the novel. Things get much more fun after the confrontation.

This novel is obsessed with small. It is slim--a hundred thirty pages in the hardback edition. Gillian lives in the smallest dorm on campus and is obsessed with gaining entrance into living quarters with even fewer people. Her obsession grows when, after a semester with the professor in a normal-sized lecture class, she is admitted to one of his workshops, with only eleven students. Her classmates grow thinner over time. Small is everywhere. There is a whole (probably longer than the book itself) thesis to be written on small in here. The themes Oates taken on, on the other hand, are not small in the least, as they never are. And, as always, she does so with such style that the reader cannot help be compelled. I didn't finish this book in one sitting only because I had to go to bed last night if I wanted to have a fresh enough mind in the morning to keep involved with the story.

Gillian's professor is fond of muttering Nietzsche under his breath at odd times. Funny that Nietzsche's most famous aphorism is never mentioned in the book: "...and if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Oates has been gazing into this particular abyss for thirty years now, throwing down that gauntlet, challenging it to gaze back, and reporting on what she finds. Perhaps she will continue to do so for another thirty years, and we will continue to get such brilliant books as this. ****½