Troubled waters, damaged ground
The Falls
By Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco, 481 pp., $26.95
If you're even the most casual of readers it's inevitable that someday you're going to confront a piece of writing by Joyce Carol Oates: a novel, short story, essay, a blurb. Her range is extensive to say the least. But it's her extraordinary fiction output that has become legendary. That a contemporary writer can produce such a body of work boggles one's imagination. With a literary reputation also intact, Oates -- the recipient of several prizes including a National Book Award -- has occasionally produced ambitious novels seemingly bent on capturing a wider audience. And this even before Oprah's book-club nod for her novel ''We Were the Mulvaneys." When she sets her imagination to writing a potboiler, she can compete with many names that shamelessly (and lucratively) own positions on the New York Times bestseller list, while attaching dark themes and a florid prose style that are uniquely her own. Which brings us to her latest novel, ''The Falls."
Spanning nearly 30 years, it begins in 1950 with a suicide. Gilbert Erskine, a recently ordained reverend and recent newlywed, plunges to his death in Horseshoe Falls on the morning following his wedding. We come to discover that he's been confronting a number of uncomfortable truths in his life; deep homoerotic longings for his best friend (and best man) and a Christian faith that is rapidly dwindling. His marriage to Ariah, a shy, insecure woman well past her youth and from a sheltered family in upstate New York, was arranged by their parents. Gilbert's suicide leaves her devastated and feeling responsible for his death. For the next week, as a search party accompanies her desperate vigil to find his body, Ariah is targeted by the media, referred to in the press as the ''Widow Bride of the Falls." Joining the search and assuming responsibility for protecting Ariah is the well-connected local attorney and playboy Dirk Burnaby. Following the eventual discovery of Gilbert's body, Ariah returns to her home in Troy, N.Y., but within a few weeks Dirk goes in search of her. After sharing an intensely passionate encounter they quickly marry.
Their marriage and burgeoning family become the focal point of the first half of the novel. Ariah awkwardly tries to adjust to Dirk's family and social circle. But as their early passion begins to mellow she becomes convinced that Dirk will eventually leave her. Ariah's fear becomes a reality when Dirk encounters Nina Olshaker, a mysterious woman whose family has been tragically affected by their toxic home environment and who is now seeking his help. Nina has lost one daughter, and two of her other children have been taken ill. Her home is situated in an eastern subdivision of Niagara Falls, the notorious environment later known as Love Canal. Dirk decides to take on this challenging case, hoping to bring justice not only to Nina's family but the entire community whose families have been victimized.
While his relationship to Nina, albeit professional and innocent, leads to estrangement from his family, the lawsuit compromises his position in his own more lucrative social community, and ultimately and mysteriously leads to his own tragic death. The second half of the novel picks up 15 years later, with the focus shifting to the three adult Burnaby children, Royall, Chandler, and Juliet, as all are forced to confront their father's legacy as well as the effects of their parents' experiences and decisions.
''The Falls" serves as a kind of index to Oates's entire canon, representing some of the best and worst that she has to offer, rehashing familiar themes as well as a number of her signature devices: compulsive and emotionally tormented characters, self-fulfilling prophecies, dark secrets, lurid sex. At her most effective Oates juxtaposes the opposing forces of nature and character in a seamless thread that runs throughout the novel, echoing back to the 19th-century novels of writers like Thomas Hardy or Nathaniel Hawthorne. ''Yet The Falls exerted its malevolent spell, that never weakened. . . . If you drifted too near, even out of intellectual curiosity, you were in danger: beginning to think thoughts unnatural to your personality as if the thunderous waters were thinking for you, depriving you of your will."
Harkening back to a more recent past, ''The Falls," in its heightened emotional impact, exerts the kind of overwrought tension that was expressed in the stylized Hollywood films of such 1950s directors as Douglas Sirk or Nicholas Ray. And in Ariah we confront not only a familiar Oates character but one who could easily have inhabited such a cinematic landscape. She's a seemingly brilliant woman whose nervous temperament and social awkwardness begin to torment not only herself but those closely associated with her. Her insufferable anxieties and numerous character tics unfortunately begin to grate on the reader as well. By the time Oates finally gets around to introducing the issues surrounding Love Canal, more than a few readers, I suspect, may have been tempted to set this novel aside. At least directors like Sirk had the good sense to keep his stories moving swiftly and the running time brief, suspecting perhaps that an audience could bear just so much of Jane Wyman.
Chris Navratil has edited two literary anthologies, ''In the House of Night" and ''Man of My Dreams." He lives in San Francisco.
