Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. by Joyce Carol Oates review – a portrait of a family and a nation in crisis
almost 4 years in The guardian
Running the gamut from tragic to funny, Joyce Carol Oates’s immersive new novel is an uncomfortable snapshot of modern-day America
Words spill from Joyce Carol Oates with fabled prolificacy. In a career spanning more than half a century, the laurelled American author has published more than a hundred books, including volumes of poetry and essays, plays and numerous bestselling novels. An enviable backlist, except that its sheer bulk and range has sometimes led her to be taken for granted. Oates’s literary agility proves oddly problematic in the latest addition to her oeuvre, too.
At nearly a thousand pages long, Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. is one of her more ambitious novels. An immersive, discursive chronicle of a family’s reconfiguration following the death of its patriarch, it borrows its title from Walt Whitman’s poem A Clear Midnight, about the soul’s release back into the universe, and an otherworldly chord resonates through portions of its narrative. Continue reading...
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