The Falls

Finally, a Joyce Carol Oates book that I could finish and not hate the characters. Finally Joyce Carol Oates creates characters that handle their grief and shame in ways that many people do. Finally a Joyce Carol Oates book that has women characters who aren't weirdos.

I have read a couple of JCO titles in the past and had come to the conclusion that she was an author of overwrought prose who secretly hated women and needed to write fiction in order to vent her spleen. This novel was different. At first, I thought, here I go again, down the only road JCO knows, but as soon as Dirk Burnaby came into the novel things changed for the better and then the history and story of the early days of the Love Canal catastrophe captured my attention. show more From there it was a book that I couldn't wait to get to on my daily commutes. I believe that the author uses Niagara Falls as a way to explore suicide, unexpected death and its accompanying shock and grief. Even though the novel also explores environmental disaster, the primary theme is grief. In this novel, Ariah Burnaby is married and widowed on the same day. Since she is a spinster this is a great humiliation as well as a shock. Then she meets Dirk Burnaby and finds happiness. Until, he becomes involved in a serious litigation - the Love Canal case. Tradgey strikes Ariah again. How she deals with this grief comprises the rest of the novel. She completely closes off herself and her family from any contact with their past and creates a cocoon of illusion around "her family." This is a state of affairs with which her children have to find their way. And it ain't easy. In the end, I discovered a novel by JCO that I actually liked, filled with a family that found a way to grow and become something in the face of great tragedy.

The recorded version of this novel was spare but effective. The narrator did a fine job of varying her voice that helped to differentiate the characters for the listener. show less

I loved this book. It captures the experience of being a sheltered woman before and during second wave feminism so well. Ariah strongly reminded me of one of my aunts and she's heartbreaking, especially when seen through the lense of her grown and nearly grown children.

I also have to admit that I love reading books set in upstate New York. It feels like home.

Ariah Burnaby is a conundrum. Not just to those around her but to me after hundreds of pages. Rarely have I spent so much time reading about a character and depart at the end feeling that I never got to really know them. Still, I very much enjoyed this book. I kept wanting to understand or see if she'd ever divulge something to explain it all. She didn't. To the end, she was ever Ariah. They sympathy I felt for her in the beginning was stripped away as the story moves along & her children, Chandler, Royall & Juliet come into their own & she is seen through them. I wanted each of the three to get away simply as a mechanism of personal survival. It was compelling reading. I very much wanted to know if any would discover that she was the show more legendary lady by The Falls waiting for her fallen first husband to be returned by the churning waters. But the mystery of Dirk Burnaby was likely all that could really be handled & that was well done.

This is going to be on my almost favorites list because while I likely won't read it again, it was a great read & will have me reflecting upon its characters for years. Also, I'm a sucker for a Niagara Falls setting. I think this was the first novel I've read of Joyce Carol Oates & I have to say that I very much liked it. show less

The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates
Fiction
A woman wakes up on the first day of her honeymoon, a widow. One of the darkest ladies of letters strikes again. The real protagonist of this meandering hell is Niagara Falls. Oates captures everything about the falls in her prose and effectively transports the reader to this Mecca of tourists and suicides. You can smell the falls, hear them, look into their depths, and above all, wish you were there. The question on the lips of everyone at the beginning of this book is, "why would anyone commit suicide?" Joyce Carol Oates commences to provide many possible reasons for this. At the end of the book the question has become, "How do so many people survive?"
Recommended by Geo, July 2005

The most compelling character in Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Falls” is the title character. Niagara Falls, the power and drama of the waterfalls…and the hypnotic aspect of one of nature’s most amazing creations…in that character I found beauty and intrigue.

“The most treacherous corner of Goat Island, as it was the most beautiful and enthralling. Here the rapids go into a frenzy. White frothy churning water shooting up fifteen feet into the air. Hardly any visibility. The chaos of a nightmare. The Horseshoe Falls is a gigantic cataract a half-mile long at its crest, three thousand tons of water pouring over the gorge each second. The air roars, shakes. The ground beneath your feet shakes. As if the very earth is beginning to show more come apart, disintegrate into particles, down to its molten center. As if time has ceased. Time has exploded. As if you’ve come too near to the radiant, thrumming, mad heart of all being. Here, your veins, arteries, the minute precision and perfection of your nerves will be unstrung in an instant. Your brain, in which you reside, that one-of-a-kind repository of you, will be pounded into its chemical components: brain cells, molecules, atoms. Every shadow and echo of every memory erased.”

“Maybe that’s the promise of The Falls? The secret?”

Sorry that quote was so long – but there’s no place to stop once you fall under the spell of those words. I’ve never been to Niagara Falls – but after reading that part, I find myself mentally forcing myself away from the edge, psychically wiping drops of heavily churned water from my skin. I am there, I feel the sounds, and my eyes are drawn into the massive amounts of water and spray and sheer force.

Whenever Oates takes us back to the falls – my interest is piqued once again. During the rest of the book, as we meet damaged character after damaged character…my interest wanes. As I have said before (and will no doubt say many times again), my fatal flaw as a reader is that I have to feel some connection to at least one of the characters in the book to really want to keep reading the book. None of the (human) characters in this book connected with me.

I did feel sympathy and interest for Ariah, “The Widow Bride of the Falls” until her character abruptly changed, or manifested itself. The idea that a groom, one day after marrying, would throw himself into Niagara Falls is quite a hook. Ariah’s feelings about this event were compelling, to say the least. But once her life takes a more conventional turn, she seems to be a different person. Instead of sympathy, I started to feel revulsion.

Which is fine… So then we enter the minds of other characters, her second husband, her children… These people have so many problems, so much despair, and seem unable to relate to their lives, their world. Maybe Oates takes us too far into their minds, into the deepest, darkest parts of their soul, where things live that no one wants to even think about, let alone talk about. Maybe I ended up knowing too much about them to connect to them.

Again, this is fine…for some readers. Oates brings forth some real truths – some we may not want to acknowledge – but ones that exist, nonetheless.

“You yearn to hurt them sometimes. Those who love you too much.”

And there’s another quote (which I now an unable to find for the life of me) that says something like “the world is torn between those who fight to be loved more and those who fight to be loved less”. This book contains multiple examples of this – inappropriate loves, shameful loves, unforgiving loves, doomed loves…

All worthy of examination…but maybe I just don’t have the stomach for such a process. Oates is such a descriptive and evocative writer…I just don’t think I am eager to see the world she describes or handle the emotions she evokes. show less

I loved this book. It captures the experience of being a sheltered woman before and during second wave feminism so well. Ariah strongly reminded me of one of my aunts and she's heartbreaking, especially when seen through the lense of her grown and nearly grown children.

I also have to admit that I love reading books set in upstate New York. It feels like home.

Joyce Carol Oates expertly takes cultural icons and important events and builds novels around them that seem vividly real--as they could very well be.

The Falls is actually several stories all wrapped into one novel. First, we meet Ariah Erksine, a newlywed whose husband commits suicide the morning after their wedding night by getting up early, racing to the falls, and plunging in. This is the strange event that gets the novel going. JCO is very good at this; many of her novels begin with events that are very strange and very tragic, but they are always believable when they roll off her pen.

The second strange event is that Dirk Burnaby, a lawyer friend of the local entrepreneur who happens to own the hotel at which Ariah is staying, and show more a rich, highly eligible bachelor, falls in love with Ariah while she keeps her eccentric, week-long vigil by the falls, until rescue crews find her husband's corpse. She becomes known as The Widow Bride of the Falls, and winds up marrying Burnaby a short time later, a man she barely knows. He's persuasive.

The two of them have a very passionate relationship and three children, before Dirk Burnaby becomes engrossed in the first Love Canal Case--this is 1962. Here, JCO provides a short history of the Love Canal tragedy that is both succinct and riveting, though she does change the names. I've googled enough to know that the basic facts are correct. This case was never resolved until 1978, and Burnably did not live to see it. On the contrary, his life was ruined because he took this case.

The latter part of the book follows his children, their relationship with their strange, damaged mother, and how each of them play a part in discovering a part of their father's past, despite their mother's determined silence. This is a family history that takes place in the wake of the famous Niagara Falls, and I found it quite poignant.

I became quite involved with this novel, and liked most of the principal characters. Though long, at 481 pages, it went by rather quickly, and I would gladly recommend it to most people. show less