A book of American martyrs, by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is the rarest of authors. She is a prolific writer,  she publishes 2-3 books each year since the 1970s yet each book stands alone, it is a world unto itself. I discovered her years ago, in the San Francisco Books, an English second-hand bookshop in Paris. And I was hooked for life. Joyce Carol Oates is creative, intelligent, sensitive. She has authored over 100 books, 60+ novels, short-stories, poetry, plays, nonfiction, she was a five-time Pulitzer finalist, has taught at Princeton for decades, she is the winner of the National Book Award and other awards, among other accolades. The quantity and the variety of her subject writing is truly shocking.

There are so many themes in Joyce Carol Oates’s  writing. There is racism, alienation, poverty, feminism, greed, murder, family disintegration, boxing. She writes about people and she often depicts hardships and violence in American cities and towns. Violence is  central in her last novel, A Book of American Martyrs. Two families are connected by a tragic incident. In the absence of the dominant males, traumatized women and children do the best they can to survive and go on with their lives. It is an intimate, riveting and highly engrossing book on one of most provocative topics in the American society, abortion, but she also addresses religion and death penalty. Oates delves deep into the depths of the human psyche, she explores what remains in a family in the aftermath of a tragedy. The price an individual must pay, pitting herself against the tide of ignorance and superstition. In this book Joyce Carol Oates looks at America today. It is an attempt to describe how it is to live in a double-side America whose two sides don't fit together.

"There is a war in the United States - there has always been this war. Those of us who are rationalists can never win for there is a stronger, more primordial and spiteful will to American irrationality."

_ Joyce Carol Oates