Bellefleur

Next to Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, Bellefleur has been the most entertaining and absording book I have ever read. Forget the meandering chronology, forget the "plot": this book is like a prosaic photo album of an extraordinary and haunted family that will leave you entirely drawn in. I picked this book up on a whim and am so glad I did, I find myself thinking about the characters still many months after reading it. For everyone who loves 100 Years of Solitude (and everyone else!), this book is an absolute must read.

I will admit from the outset that I am NOT a diehard Joyce Carol Oates fan, but in this book she manages to retain all of her strengths (her poetry, her characterizations) and somehow minimize all of her weaknesses (most notably what seems to be a real masochistic/sadistic streak--check out Blonde, for example). I've always read this as an homage of some sort to Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, and even in comparison to the masterpiece that THAT book is--this well holds it own. It might even be better. (And if you can't sacrifice chronology to theme every once in a while, well, you might as well be reading Danielle Steele.)

For me this is simply the finest novel ever penned, by anyone. Oates manages to capture a sweeping family saga and combine it with a living, breathing landscape in the shape the Chautaugua Valley. Bellefleur is a massive mansion in which generations of an American family have lived, died and prospered. Oates manages to hold onto the many narrative threads, interweave them and then bring the whole pattern to a dramatic and devastating conclusion. Simply awesome.

Joyce Carol Oates weaves unforgettable characters and fantastic storylines into this 500+ page masterpiece. Of the thousands of pages of fiction I read each year her characters remain the longest and most prominent in my memory. If you love a great story I highly recommend Bellefleur