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Summary
Summary
New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates returns with an incendiary novel that illuminates the tragic impact of sexual violence, racism, brutality, and power on innocent lives and probes the persistence of stereotypes, the nature of revenge, the complexities of truth, and our insatiable hunger for sensationalism.
When a fourteen-year-old girl is the alleged victim of a terrible act of racial violence, the incident shocks and galvanizes her community, exacerbating the racial tension that has been simmering in this New Jersey town for decades. In this magisterial work of fiction, Joyce Carol Oates explores the uneasy fault lines in a racially troubled society. In such a tense, charged atmosphere, Oates reveals that there must always be a sacrifice--of innocence, truth, trust, and, ultimately, of lives. Unfolding in a succession of multiracial voices, in a community transfixed by this alleged crime and the spectacle unfolding around it, this profound novel exposes what--and who--the "sacrifice" actually is, and what consequences these kind of events hold for us all.
Working at the height of her powers, Oates offers a sympathetic portrait of the young girl and her mother, and challenges our expectations and beliefs about our society, our biases, and ourselves. As the chorus of its voices--from the police to the media to the victim and her family--reaches a crescendo, The Sacrifice offers a shocking new understanding of power and oppression, innocence and guilt, truth and sensationalism, justice and retribution.
A chilling exploration of complex social, political, and moral themes--the enduring trauma of the past, modern racial and class tensions, the power of secrets, and the primal decisions we all make to protect those we love--The Sacrifice is a major work of fiction from one of our most revered literary masters.
Author Notes
Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Syracuse University and a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin.
She is the author of numerous novels and collections of short stories. Her works include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Bellefleur, You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, Because It Is My Heart, Solstice, Marya : A Life, and Give Me Your Heart. She has received numerous awards including the National Book Award for Them, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature. She was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her title Lovely, Dark, Deep. She also wrote a series of suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. In 2015, her novel The Accursed became listed as a bestseller on the iBooks chart.
She worked as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, before becoming the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She and her late husband Raymond J. Smith operated a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this disjointed tale of race, community, and pride, a teenage black girl named Sybilla Frye is raped and left for dead in the basement of an abandoned New Jersey factory. Inspired by the 1988 Tawana Brawley case, this supposed whodunit becomes clouded by race and politics after Sybilla accuses white police officers of the crime. Her mother, Ednetta Frye, refuses to cooperate with police as outrage boils over in their community of Red Rock, part of the fictional city of Pascayne, N.J. After the spotlight-seeking Rev. Marus Mudrick starts the "Crusade for Justice for Sybilla Frye," the crime devolves into a nationwide spectacle. Pascayne begins to splinter, and once-certain facts turn to doubts and intrigue until the true reason for the attack becomes clear. New Jersey has been familiar territory for Oates, most recently in her gothic novel The Accursed. In The Sacrifice, however, each chapter jumps to a new, unpredictable perspective, making the story fragmented and often repetitive. Oates's heavy and overt focus on race leaves little room for nuance, despite the complex and multifaceted events of her book. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A fictional account of the infamous Tawana Brawley case.Ednetta Frye has been searching for her daughter for days when a neighbor finds the girl bound with cords and covered in feces. The 14-year-old Sybilla is severely injured, and racial slurs have been scrawled on her body. Sybilla claims that several menincluding at least one "white cop"abducted her and held her captive while they beat her and raped her. But even before Ednetta hides her daughter from the police and social workers who come looking for hereven before they leave the hospitalthe girl's account seems to raise more questions than it answers. At this point, most readers will be thinking of Brawley, and Oates' (Carthage, 2014; The Accursed, 2013, etc.) narrative certainly hews closely to the known facts of that 1987 case. But the author also uses fiction as an opportunity to interrogate the circumstances that made Brawley's story a sensation and gave it meaning. Sybilla becomes a symbol of her blighted community, of black mistrust of a mostly white police department, of the way the larger public refuses to take an interest when a black girl is assaulted. The ultimate question seems to be: If Sybilla's story is false, does that make racismindividual acts and structural inequalitiesany less true? In order to offer this broad picture, Oates tells her story from a variety of perspectives. Unfortunately, except for adding details about themselves, the multiple narrators mostly just tell us the same information over and over again without adding nuance or fresh insights. And the shifts in point of view can be baffling, sometimes occurring within a single paragraph. This pushes the reader right out of the story, as does the author's unpersuasive attempts to capture the speech of several key characters. Oates revives an old scandal without making it new. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Everyone remarks on how prolific Oates is, but the real significance of her literary fecundity liesin the power and daring of her novels and short stories and how they provoke and disturb us by tapping into our most elemental fears and desires. Oates is a tireless and explicit explorer of the deep-dark origins of the perpetual battle between female and male, the lust and the terror. Over and over again, Oates dramatizes both random violence against women and the sickening intimacy and betrayal of men's assaults on women who love them. Oates is equally unflinching in her inquiry into class and racial conflicts, and in her imaginative and intrepid variations on actual circumstances and crimes, from the limited choices of disadvantaged women in her Detroit-set National Book Award-winning them (1969) to Marilyn Monroe's disastrous celebrity in Blonde (2000) to a tale of the opposite lives of two college students in Black Girl/White Girl (2006) to the JonBenet Ramsey case and the horrors of the tabloid press in My Sister, My Love (2008) to the festering wound of a long-ago New Jersey lynching in The Accursed (2013). All of Oates' key themes and strategies converge in her newest taut and unnerving novel. The Sacrifice is set in 1987 in a poor African American neighborhood in a racially dividedNew Jersey city, where Ednetta, as distraught and wailing as a character in a Greek tragedy, is haunting the streets, asking everyone she comes across if they've seen her 14-year-old daughter, Sybilla (which means prophetess or oracle). We quickly learn that Ednetta dropped out of high school when she had her first child at 16 and that she has been living with a notoriously volatile and unfaithful man, Anis, who did time for murdering his wife. Sybilla is soon found by Ada, a courageous substitute teacher who ventures into the foul basement of a long-abandoned riverside factory when she hears a faint cry. The girl, whom Ada remembers as sassy and impudent, is on the floor, tied up and smeared with feces. She has been beaten, and her face is swollen. Racial slurs have been scrawled on her torso. Many readers will recognize this as a variation on the still controversial 1987 Tawana Brawley case, in which a New York State teen found in a similar condition claimed to have been raped and abused by white men, including a police officer and prosecutor. Accordingly, Sybilla insists that white cops abducted and raped her. And just as Brawley drew the very public support of Reverend Al Sharpton, Sybilla is championed by the meticulously tailored and coiffed firebrand, Reverend Marcus Mudrick, who woos the traumatized mother and daughter with roses and limousines as he turns Sybilla's alleged attack into a cause célèbre and money magnet. Using Brawley's complexly distressing story as an armature, Oates builds her own gripping tale of how the horrific legacy of slavery has poisoned family relationships and fueled police brutality against African Americans. Ednetta and Sybilla are vividly complex and affecting characters, but it is Oates' compassionate portrait of Anis that most searingly illuminates the consequences of this tragic inheritance. He is tormented by grief and rage over his brother's death at the hands of the police, anguish that drives him to terrorize those closest to him. Oates is equally insightful in her characterization of individuals who seek to exploit the suffering of others, distorting and denying the truth for their own aggrandizement and profit, as well as those who enable them by forsaking common sense in their salacious credulity. Readers may find this boldly incendiary and propulsive novel vexing, even offensive. And Oates fully intends to make readers squirm. We do urgently need to face our unexamined assumptions and prejudices. But for all its headline brashness, visceral magnification, and societal melodrama, The Sacrifice is laced with striking psychological subtleties, painful ironies, and flashes of tenderness and wit. A sure-fire catalyst for meaningful discussion. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Courting controversy, Oates' explosive novel will arrive on the high wave of a national promotional campaign and author appearances.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WRITING DIFFERENCE IS a challenge, particularly in fiction. How do men write women and vice versa? How do writers of one race or ethnicity write about people of another race or ethnicity? More important, how do writers tackle difference without reducing their characters to caricatures or stereotypes? Some handle the challenge with aplomb. Bill Cheng's "Southern Cross the Dog" and Louise Erdrich's "The Round House" come to mind. Others fail: At one point in Kathryn Stockett's "The Help," a black woman compares her skin color with that of a cockroach. To write difference well demands empathy, an ability to respect the humanity of those you mean to represent. In late November 1987, Tawana Brawley was found in her upstate New York hometown, covered in racist and misogynist slurs, feces in her hair. The teenager said she had been kidnapped and raped by several white men, including police officers and (in a detail she added later) an assistant district attorney. The horrifying story quickly generated national headlines. Al Sharpton and two lawyers, Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, began to represent the young woman and "manage" her interests. There were holes in Brawley's story, though, and the case quickly inflamed racial tensions. (Granted, anything that reminds people racism exists tends to "inflame racial tensions.") Nearly a year later, a grand jury determined Brawley had lied. The case remains divisive to this day because it touches on so many fraught issues: race, class, sexual violence and the winners and losers in America's justice system. Joyce Carol Oates's new novel, "The Sacrifice," is a fictional retelling of the Brawley story, set in the invented Red Rock neighborhood of Pascayne, N. J., and based so heavily on the facts of the actual case that you could think of it as true-crime fan fiction. The novel opens with Ednetta Frye frantically searching for her daughter in the streets of Red Rock. From there, it traverses multiple points of view to describe how a community reacts to tragedy even as the truth remains elusive. At the center of the constellation of characters is Sybilla Frye, the young woman found bloody and bruised, degraded in an abandoned factory. There is also Ada Furst, a substitute teacher who finds the brutalized Sybilla; Ines Iglesias, the "Hispanic American" detective assigned to the case; Anis Schutt, Sybilla's stepfather, who beat his first wife to death; the twin brothers Marus Cornelius and Byron Randolph Mudrick, a minister and a lawyer who come to represent Sybilla's interests; Jerold Zahn, the young man accused of being one of the rapists; and the Black Prince, a Muslim community leader who later takes up Sybilla's cause. As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that nearly all of the characters sacrifice something - faith, hope, dignity, truth, justice. There are strong moments. As a stand-in for Sharpton, the Rev. Marus Mudrick is flamboyantly inspired, particularly when Ednetta meets him for the first time: "She had never seen, at close quarters, so suavely handsome a man, so elegantly masculine a man; she was conscious of his dazzling-white smile, his burnished, caramel-colored skin, the fine-trimmed mustache on his upper lip. Reverend Mudrick wore a three-piece suit of a dark, soft wool, with a waistcoat in a lighter fabric, a white silk shirt and a rich, resplendent salmon-colored silk tie." His character is impeccably drawn in how he speaks, comports himself and orchestrates the spectacle of outrage. Oates doesn't lack for ambition. Her narrative builds carefully and patiently, revealing how this kind of morality play can occur. She covers a great deal of sociological ground - domestic violence, colorism in the black community, class issues both inside the black community and between the black and white populations of Pascayne. In one perceptive scene, Anis Schutt is pulled over by a police cruiser, and Oates demonstrates great insight into the reality of driving while black. "There were two choices," she writes: "silent, or deferential. Silent might be mistaken by the cops for sullen, dangerous. Deferential might be mistaken for mockery." Through Ada Furst, Oates also offers a brief interpretive history of the civil rights movement, falling back on a heavy-handed, somewhat condescending didacticism: "Ada recalled the great excitement in Red Rock when the bill had finally been passed. Lyndon Johnson had been everyone's hero at the time. Memories were strong of John F. Kennedy who'd been assassinated for championing black people. Then, Revered King Jr. - of course. Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X - assassinated for their beliefs in social justice." The problems in this novel, however, are legion. Again and again Oates comes frustratingly close to creating in-depth portraits only to back away. These characters have so much yearning - for love, fulfillment, acceptance, reprieve from suffering - that demands to be explored and is instead ignored. There is little sense of closure for the numerous plot threads, no sense of deliberation in how these story lines are abandoned. The awkward attempt at political statement is so blatant as to detract from the storytelling. And Oates has a distracting quirk of offering certain words and phrases parenthetically, though to what end remains unclear. Then there are the physical descriptions; this novel contains a lot of dark skin and nappy hair. Oates is particularly preoccupied with Ednetta Frye's heavy breathing and high blood pressure. Cumulatively, these descriptions leave the reader with a distinct impression not of the characters but of the writer who created them. The n-word is used flagrantly, as if this were a Quentin Tarantino screenplay, often without plausible context. There is also the baffling use of the word "nigra" as scrawled on Sybilla's chest, a word that would not have been part of the vernacular in New Jersey in the 1980s, or ever, for persons black or white. That, however, is not this novel's most significant problem. Writers can and should write across difference, so long as they do so respectfully, intelligently, with some degree of accuracy. They may not fully succeed, but a good-faith effort and a demonstration of empathy are generally all that is required. There is little such empathy in "The Sacrifice." Too often, difference is treated as caricature, as the speculations of someone who understands the black or working-class experience only through what might be gleaned from an encyclopedia. Some of the black characters speak in a dialect vaguely resembling African-American Vernacular English, but inconsistently and seemingly without syntactic rules - although A.A.V.E. has, in fact, both a grammar and a phonology. This is most glaring when Ednetta Frye speaks. She does not pronounce the short "i" (or, occasionally, the rest of the vowels), yet there are lines of dialogue where the dialect is not applied consistently even within the same sentence. Here she is, for instance, complaining to Sergeant Iglesias: "My daughter's health come first, before anythin else. You got this girl to tell you somethin could get her killed, and you better not misuse it, or S'b'lla, I'm warnin you - Off'cer." This inconsistency becomes increasingly egregious and then it becomes deeply offensive. The lack of empathy is not just a social problem but a literary one, and this novel's biggest failing is its utter disregard for nuance. Oates approaches difference like a creative experiment, without giving enough consideration to the experiment's impact. By the end of the novel, the narrative offers an explanation for how Sybilla came to be so battered when Ada Fürst discovered her, how the teenager invented so damaging a story with such unfathomable repercussions, how a fractured community fractured even further. This resolution should offer satisfaction; there is pleasure in fiction that provides answers where in reality there can be none. Alas, Oates handles critical issues so irresponsibly, with so little empathy as to make the ambiguity and mess of reality ever so soothing. ROXANE GAY is the author of the novel "An Untamed State" and the essay collection "Bad Feminist."
