The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel (P.S.)
by Joyce Carol Oates
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Book Reviews of The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel (P.S.)
Book Review: Oates explores impact of childhood abuse on development of woman's identity
Summary: 5 Stars
In "The Gravedigger's Daughter," Joyce Carol Oates explores the impact of childhood abuse on the development of a woman's identity. Her intricately designed and compelling novel details the brutal early life of Rebbeca Schwart and follows her into adulthood, one in which the grown woman casts off previous sufferings but never escapes their cruel shadow. The youngest child of an impoverished German Jewish immigrant family, Rebecca endures a barren early life that includes being subjected to an ill-tempered, violent father, the slow and tortured descent of her mother into mental illness and the callous disregard of her two insensitive older brothers.
Unable to endure the moral and spiritual poverty of their graveyard surroundings, Rebecca's brothers flee the wrath of their father and the hopelessness of their condition. Eventually, Rebecca witnesses the murder/suicide of her mother and father, an event whose impact reverberates throughout her life. Abandoned, traumatized and directionless, Rebecca must reinvent herself, first as a ward of the court, then as a wife and mother. It is Oates' brilliant depiction of a woman struggling to create a new self while simultaneously attempting to submerge her previous identity that gives "The Gravedigger's Daughter" its emotional impact. Rebecca's cryptic personae permit her to survive but never grant her existential peace.
What solace she savors derives from her brilliant but tormented son, he the product of one of the most nefarious characters of contemporary literature. Beguiled and then beaten by Niles Tignor, Rebecca re-experiences the controlling, violent outbursts that characterized her father. Her act of personal liberation, her reinvention of identity and her commitment to her child's wellbeing exemplify a quiet, implacable will to live. Always wary of being discovered, perpetually cautious and suspicious, Rebecca refuses to give herself away to any man or idea. She lives to survive.
Written with excruciating detail, "The Gravedigger's Daughter" is much more than an exploration of one woman's consciousness. Joyce Carol Oates has crafted a work that explicitly describes violence, directly confronts social injustice and sensitively describes how a thwarted human spirit heals itself. This is a novel that will unsettle and upset, but it is also a cautionary tale of how identity, however shattered, will undergo reformation and reinvention.
Book Review: born again
Summary: 5 Stars
the pattern for `The Gravedigger's Daughter' is `The Bible'. the setting up scenes and relating them twice I attributed to william faulkner, which also could be, as cited in `My Sister, My Love' repetitive compulsion syndrome, but I was, maybe partially, wrong. the pattern for `The Gravedigger's Daughter' is `The Bible'. the protagonist, rebecca, old testament name, is the daughter of jacob, and their story is similar to the stories of the old testament, the suffering, the violence, the coming to a strange land. that rebecca survives is an act of grace. zachariah, the deejay on the airwaves, is a jazz prophet, and rebecca's son, miraculously gifted, transforms his mother's life. the book concludes with a series of letters, as in `The Bible', and in the final letter there's promise of a second coming, as in `The Book of Revelation', `The Bible's' last letter.
oates continues her interest with the african american literary trope of passing. the biblical form might also be said to be taking an african american literary trope of religious content and adapting that trope to biblical form. i said, might be; judeo-christian religious content isn't a literary theme exclusive to african american authors. but give her credit; oates contributes in the shattering of the shibboleth that influences belong to a specific group.
some of nella larsen's `Passing' is here. and some of frank conroy's `Body and Soul'. and oates is neither black nor male.
i admit mine is an obscure review, but it gains clarity once you're reading the book. why read the book? because it's an excellent story, and one of joyce carol oates' best.
joyce carol oates, bar none, is the quintessential american (that's the united states part of america) writer. i even rank her higher than philip roth as the next american (of both continents) deserving of a nobel prize for literature.
Book Review: Please Write Something Leaner than a Phone Book
Summary: 1 Stars
The Gravedigger's Daughter is yet another of Oates's tomes concerning the fluidity of an American woman's identity. Rebecca Schwart, a German immigrant whose father Jacob attempts to erase his Jewish heritage while living as a gravedigger in upstate New York, grows up in a dysfunctional family grimed with poverty and suspicion. The book's account of Rebecca's life is disjointed--it begins with her at 23, encountering a mysterious man on her way home from a factory job, and then regresses to recount every bleak detail of her childhood. Her life is so bleak as to actually have less realism than you'd think: her brother is a pervert, her parents are either hateful or detached, and she has few friends or allies--at least until she marries and has a son with Niles Tignor, a mysterious criminal.
Here the book becomes tiresome. Oates, where she could use two words, prefers to use fifty or even one hundred, sprinkled throughout a text bloated from what could be three hundred pages into more than six hundred. If she had cut the repetition of inner monologue and sped the narrative, the book might've turned out shorter than a phone directory. Oates, however, seems to pride herself on all her novels being ridiculously huge. Rebecca's later life (including her very long political conversation with a lover's decrepit father) is too much to bear. Oate's endless and mostly out-of-place criticisms of Christianity are dull and pedantic as in all her previous books; they are also poorly reasoned. I won't buy another Oates book until she drops her atheist-preachiness (an oxymoron?) and writes a full-length novel less than four-hundred pages.
Book Review: Once beauty is smashed, it can't be remade
Summary: 5 Stars
Her father said to Rebecca that she must hide her weakness. She hated him. Niles Tignor, her husband, had brought her to Chautauqua Falls in 1956. She worked for Niagra Tubing and had a three-year old, Niles Jr. She had been the gravedigger's daughter.
The Schwart family had arrived in Milburn, New York in 1936. Jacob Schwart found a job as a caretaker at the cemetery. Jacob Schwart had the appearance of a troll. In Munich he had been a math instructor.
School was the event of Rebecca's life. Rebecca, more than the two sons, resembled her father. In 1949 she was orphaned. Rose Lutter, Rebecca's teacher, offered to pay for her parents' burial and to take her in.
After the murder-suicide, the house was razed. Miss Lutter was a scrupulous housekeeper. Rebecca was hated in school, tormented, and she fought back. She was expelled. She did not want to appeal the decision and she stayed away from the tidy house.
Rebecca went to Niagra Falls for her honeymoon. In the early years of the seeming marriage Rebecca could not bear to return to Milburn.
This is a wonderful story. These are filled-out Joyce Carol Oates characters. (Many more characters exist in the novel than are mentioned here.) The writer makes the reader care about their fate. The region of the United States she knows well is described beautifully and in detail. The afterward is noteworthy. It is poignant and surprising.
Book Review: Identity and Displacement
Summary: 2 Stars
Rebecca Schwart, a first-generation American, whose family had fled Nazi Germany to settle in a small town in upstate New York, struggles to fit in both in her family as well as in society.
Stricken by tragedy when her parents, who are driven to their graves when they are unable to get over their displacement and integrate with their adopted country, Rebecca strikes out to find her place alone, and meets a protector-turned-abuser in Niles Tignor, a brewery salesman with some shady dealings.
The rest of the novel shows how she adopt a new personality and is a celebration of one woman's true grit and determination to survive and triumph over her circumstances.
JC Oates never fails to paint larger-to-life characters, warts and all, and that is a large part of the appeal of her works. However, one finds it hard to be totally drawn by Rebecca and her flapper alter-ego she adopts, perhaps because Oates paints her as someone who is so adept at playing the role of the smiling, obliging female that becomes her armour of defence against the largely misogynist males that come her way. At some point, the character also becomes impervious to the reader.
I found the last part of the novel, a coda of sorts, in the form of letters, a rather unsatisfying conclusion to an overlong novel that traces Rebecca's search for identity and the oppression of her father's presence as well as her guilt at not having been there for her mother in her adolescence.