Beasts

Rating:
Summary: The Harem of Andre Harrow...
Review: The cover of the paperback edition of this book contains detail from a 18th century painting by Henry Fussell entitled, Nightmare. Precisely the right selection, since much of the action of this novel takes place under cover of darkness, as the young women of Catamount College near the Berkshires inexorably succumb, as though under a trance, to the dark world of Andre Harrow, professor of literature at Catamount, and his wife, Dorcas, an artist specializing in the display of wood carved totems. This is a hypnotic tale; you cannot abandon Gillian once you meet her and you cannot fail to watch the evolution of her obssession with the house on Brierely (sic) Lane and the dark, manipulative couple that calls it home. More than half-way through this short, tightly written masterpiece, Joyce Carol Oates writes: "How obsession takes root, like a virulent weed." And so it does take hold of Gillian.
At the beach, the airport, at home or abroad, this superbly written tale keeps you glued. This novel, like an intense dream, absorbs you completely.

Rating:
Summary: *Beasts*
Review: This book is haunting my thoughts days after i read it.

In 138 pages, there's not much room for action to occur - but the characters are developed just enough so you feel like you know them - but just too little that they remain mysterious and can surprise you.

It takes place on a college campus - in a woman's dorm - and in a poetry class. All of the students fall madly in love with the teacher - but the narrator also becomes fascinated and intrigued by his wife. The couple takes an interest in several of the girls - which excites them at first but ends up disastrous.

This book shows true human nature, which many people like to ignore. Joyce Carol Oates portrays people as beasts, no different than the ones that the scupltress-wife creates - which disgust and repulse the town as well as the narrator.

Most of this book is slow with little action and then the ending is explosive and left me thinking for days.

This little novella is incredible once it has time to sink in!

Rating:
Summary: Subtle though provocative
Review: This intense and brilliantly written novella by America's most prolific author in the last fifty years, strikes with tasteful subtlety, the darker aspects of human nature. The text is also an examination of exploitation and seduction, used by those in a position of power and authority, the opportunity to satisfy their perverse desires. One is reminded that education and 'class' has nothing to do with morality. The SS, for example, would drink expensive wine, listening to recordings of Mozart and Schubert, while Jews mercilessly burned, just outside their windows. Education and good breeding does not equate to living the ethical good life. As history has shown, Plato was wrong. Evil is a separate issue to education; it presents in many forms.

~Beasts~ is a provocative tale about an inexperienced university student in the seventies who falls in love with her literature professor - an arrogant, bohemian literary type, that vomits clichés about the works of D.H. Lawrence and Fredric Nietzsche, but to a young girl, opens whole new vistas to the world of literature. The professor is married also to an unconventional French artist, whose derivative, aboriginal/erotic sculptures, has caused violent responses from the town folk's middle class sensibilities. This couple is unique, relative to their surroundings, which draw hungry for experience adolescent schoolgirls' into their elite though sordid lair. What scintillating and dark pleasures reside within their mysterious domain?

I've always believed that the mark of a good writer is the ability to communicate sensational subject matter in quiet, understated prose, thereby doubling the affect on the unsuspecting reader. Oates's control of her art form is clearly expressed in ~Beasts~; she combines Gothic nuances with psychological insight and makes you believe every word. This was a pleasure to read.

Rating:
Summary: The line between the liberated and the merely hungry
Review: This is a beautiful short novel. Short novels have for some time been considered difficult to sell and to market, and when they do come out they are liable to received a mixed reception. They allow more character development or more development of a single theme, but do not present the larger scope a longer novel affords. As a result, there can be this feeling that nothing happens when, in fact, everything is happening.

This is the case in BEASTS, and the character of Gillian, a college student in the 1970's who writes poetry: competent, orderly, technically sophisticated poetry. Her world is turned upside down when she falls in love with the intensely charismatic and hedonistic Professor Andre Harrow, who likes to blow up the walls of poetic forms - as well as conventional morality. Along with his wild, powerfully sexual wife, he sometimes adopts his students as "interns." Gillian's straight-laced character is defined by her UNcharacteristic fascination with Harrow, with a very deft touch. Through her, we explore the question of whether Harrow's hedonism and freedom is simply predation in an elegant guise. Recommended.