American literature doesn't have many Russians, Dostoyevskys into whose ears a mad god dictates, writers who are possessed. Melville is one, and Faulkner is another, and Norman Mailer on occasion is a third, depending on the phase of his moon. Joyce Carol Oates, however, is a Russian, drunk on God and history, hearing voices, speaking tongues, slapdash and parenthetical and repetitious and headlong, as if she had been hurled out of time and memory and patience, as if the future were a killer whale. (pp. 436-37)

The conventions of literature are, for Miss Oates, truncheons and harpoons. On one level, "Bellefleur" is Gothic pulp fiction, cleverly consuming itself. We are introduced to generation after generation of Bellefleurs, a family with a "curse." Is the curse passion, or greed?…

On another level, "Bellefleur" is fairy tale and myth, distraught literature. There is a walled garden, a decayed tower, a...