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Summary
Summary
"Oates is just a fearless writer...with her brave heart and her impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers."
--Los Angeles Times
"[An] extraordinarily intense, racking, and resonant novel."
--Booklist (starred review)
One of the most acclaimed writers in the world today, the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates follows up her searing, New York Times bestselling memoir, A Widow's Story, with an extraordinary new work of fiction. Mudwoman is a riveting psychological thriller, taut with dark suspense, that explores the high price of repression in the life of a respected university president teetering on the precipice of a nervous breakdown. Like Daphne DuMaurier's gothic masterwork, Rebecca, and the classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, Oates's Mudwoman is a chilling page-turner that hinges on the power of the imagination and the blurry lines between the real and the invented--and it stands tall among the author's most powerful and beloved works, including The Falls, The Gravedigger's Daughter, and We Were the Mulvaneys.
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 (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Oates begins her 38th novel with a nod to Nietzsche ("What is man? A ball of snakes") that lies at the mud-caked heart of this tale of the rise and stumbling fall of M.R. Neukirchen, a brilliant academic whose childhood starts in the mudflats of the Black Snake River, where she is abandoned in 1965. But by 2002, M.R. has reached the top of the ivory tower. After a full ride to Cornell, and a Ph.D. from Harvard, she is now, at 41, the first female president of another Ivy institution. M.R.'s ambitious plans include upending the patriarchy and increasing diversity on campus, but both prove difficult in the post-9/11 "era of 'Patriotism' " as the U.S. prepares to invade Iraq. M.R.'s identity, idealism, and sanity are all threatened as she wades through obstacles, including sabotaging right-wing colleagues and students. Though she has never considered herself the victim of sexism, M.R. must confront her gender when it becomes the lens through which her leadership is judged. Likewise, the philosophical question she has dedicated her career to answering-what is the self?-must be turned inward. Oates's prose, dominated by run-on sentences to imitate fury or swiftness and a colloquial voice lacking nuance, is uninspired, but fans will relish the depth of this inquiry. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The desolate wilds along the Black Snake River in the shadow of the Adirondacks, a land of epic poverty, is the last place one would expect a college president to hail from, especially the first woman to head a prestigious Ivy League institution. All M. R., commanding, ambitious, and unmarried, says about her childhood is that she was raised by Quakers. But now that she's at the top of her game, her suppressed and brutal past in that malevolent land of mudflats, decay, and atrocities reaches out to grab her like a grotesque swamp creature. Enraged by the Iraq War, embroiled in a thorny campus scandal, and terribly lonely in the mausoleum-like president's mansion, M. R. slowly and excruciatingly comes undone as Oates reveals the horrors M. R. endured as mudgirl in primeval scenes of madness, terror, and mythic rescue. In this extraordinarily intense, racking, and resonant novel, a giant among Oates' big books, including The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007), chilling archetypal mysteries vie with ringing indictments of war, academic and corporate malfeasance, and environmental destruction. Masterfully enmeshing nightmare and reality, Oates has created a resolute, incisive, galvanizing drama about our deep connection to place, the persistence of the past, and the battles of a resilient soul under siege from within and without. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A major, controversy-ready novel from high-profile, protean Oates, who will be on tour in sync with a far-reaching and diversified media campaign.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
RUNNING an Ivy League university isn't all it's cracked up to be, at least not for Meredith Ruth Neukirchen, known as M.R., the protagonist of Joyce Carol Oates's new novel. She's the first woman to be president of an unnamed school in New Jersey, an obvious stand-in for Princeton, where Oates is the Roger S. Berlind distinguished professor of the humanities. M.R. is "renowned in academic circles," an eminent philosopher, a diplomatic administrator and a selfless hard worker. But a creeping distress threatens to engulf her. Living by herself in the museumlike president's house has proved lonely and uncomfortable. She has no intimate friends. Her secret, much older lover is not only long married to someone else and ensconced at far-off Harvard, he has begun staying away entirely, seeming less than thrilled by her professional ascent. In unguarded moments, M.R. admits that even her nonstop work is a trial, her laptop attached to her "like a colostomy bag." Then there's the clash between her idealism and the realpolitik expected of someone in her position. She wants to speak out against the looming Iraq war and reform the university's "'historic' (i.e., Caucasian-patriarchal/hierarchical) structure." Instead she must stay politically "neutral," court wealthy donors and follow the quietist advice of the legal counsel she inherited from her predecessor. Internally, she's tortured in so many ways that we're not surprised when, on a trip to Cornell to deliver a speech in which she intends to come out against the war, she finds herself driving from her hotel into the wilds of upstate New York, near the town where she grew up. Something about the landscape induces a fugue of half-memories and a strange compulsion to keep going, until she has stranded her rental car in a vast stretch of mud flats. Yes, it's time for M.R. to confront her destiny as a Joyce Carol Oates character. Although she manages to grope her way out of the marsh, her life is transformed into something macabre and terrifying, borrowing elements of tabloid crime and psychological horror. M.R.'s earliest years, it turns out, involved ritualized sexual abuse, a deranged religious-freak mother, a traumatic near-death event in those same mud flats and a hazardous stint in foster care. She was eventually adopted by a kindly, bookish Quaker couple, but there's some confusion about another daughter they once had whose name they have given to M.R. The adult M.R. works furiously to shield herself from full knowledge of her past, seeing it only in tiny bits of memory, a fixation on anything to do with mud, a conviction that she's unwomanly and unattractive, a sense of wonder that she's alive at all. Oates fills in details of M.R.'s childhood in alternate chapters, so that in the present her own physical and emotional crumbling comes to seem inevitable. Toward the end of the novel, she returns to her childhood home to reconnect with her playful, modestly erudite father. He becomes a staunch, appealing figure - a male nurturer who calls to mind Oates's moving portrait of her first husband, Raymond Smith, in her memoir, "A Widow's Story." With her father's help, M.R. starts making a life apart from the prestigious job that both shelters and destroys her. "Mudwoman" falters in a belabored subplot about a politically conservative student who fakes an attack on himself and is, M.R. fears, driven to attempt suicide because of her handling of the situation. His story never quite resonates with M.R.'s own. Likewise, M.R.'s preoccupation with the Iraq war doesn't shed interesting light on either the war or her own psychology. More successfully, Oates makes aspects of M.R.'s scholarly work an outgrowth of her childhood trauma, having her pose philosophical questions like "Why am I here, and not rather - nowhere?" But in the confrontation between the novel's intellectual concerns and its Gothic drive to show how something tainted and monstrous keeps eating away at an abused innocent, the Gothic, by going for the gut punch, inevitably wins. So it's a weird relief when the novel's passive-aggressive academics exit the stage and M.R. plunges into graphic nightmares of self-abasement and revenge, letting loose the timeless, Poe-like internal terror at which Oates excels. Once M.R. has accepted her history, a deeper struggle awaits. She inhabits her academic world convincingly, but how can she make a real impression on it? And how can she overcome her resentment, enjoy her own power? For a lifelong good girl and high achiever, a star student and natural pleaser of authority figures, arriving at the top can be bewildering. "My dream is to be - of service!" M.R. thinks, but she ends up feeling like a servant, required to bow and scrape before donors who appear to find her inadequate as a college president. She can neither experience her position in some pleasurable way nor use it to change the university for the better. It's a predicament that strikes me as an exaggerated version of Oates's own. "Of course she was a workhorse," Oates writes of M.R., "but an uncomplaining workhorse - with the Harvard degree, and publications, something of a Thoroughbred-workhorse." The bitter questions can't be escaped: At what point is a prolific worker a kind of sucker? Is all the productivity just a way to escape the pain of facing other areas of life? "No more potent narcotic than work!" Oates writes. A scene from "A Widow's Story" comes to mind: Smith has just been admitted to the hospital with a serious case of pneumonia, and as he lies in his bed, hooked up to an inhaler, he and Oates both take out work and start beavering away. A nurse disturbs them and is shocked when they ask her to stop talking. You can hear the nurse thinking, Do you people realize where you are? A few days later, Smith is dead. As an author and by all accounts a model academic, Oates, like M.R., works and works but can't quite get full respect. You hear her name and wait for the inevitable "joke" about the rapid pace at which her books appear. But neither can she ever quite write a cultural landmark, a transcendent book that would elevate her to that place where the jokes don't stick. Noir and crime fans adore her, yet her work in those genres isn't approached with the reverence reserved for, say, Patricia Highsmith. Even on the level of pop culture, Oates's lack of influence is striking, given her ubiquity: for decades she outlined a sensibility now ascendant in juggernauts like the "Twilight" series and "The Hunger Games," yet her fingerprints aren't discernible on either of them. "No time! No time! No time for her meager self," Oates writes in "Mudwoman." Even as it travels over familiar Oates territory, there's a freshness to this novel, a sense of some new, more personal beginning. It's bold of Joyce Carol Oates to paint achievement akin to her own as just the flip side of victimization - and it's perhaps even bolder to make such visceral drama from the story of a workaholic who finally confronts life unhooked from a keyboard. 'Of course she was a workhorse,' Oates's heroine tells herself, but also 'a Thoroughbred-workhorse.' Maria Russo is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
