"Bellefleur" is the most ambitious book to come so far from that alarming phenomenon Joyce Carol Oates. However one may carp, the novel is proof, if any seems needed, that she is one of the great writers of our time. "Bellefleur" is a symbolic summation of all this novelist has been doing for 20-some years, a magnificent piece of daring, a tour de force of imagination and intellect…. What we learn, reading "Bellefleur," is that Joyce Carol Oates is essentiall...

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. (...

When a plot grossly outweighs the main story, as it does here, the form is inefficient or else the novel is satirical. Bellefleur is definitely not satirical. It is an incredibly elaborate gothic romance, stuffed to overflowing with outsize, grotesquely intense characters who speak to one another breathlessly, in a rage or merely incoherently, and who beg to be taken as emblems for moral qualities or historical forces, or both. (p. 4) It is certainly possible to read and enjoy a novel with characters and in...

Joyce Carol Oates's 12th novel, Bellefleur, is stuffed with … joyous, breathless nonsense. It is the great gift here. One begins this overlong, voluptuously written book by resisting the Gothic winds; but then, because Hugh Walpole, the Brontes, and Mary Shelley really did invent something magical, one surrenders. Joyce Carol Oates has a huge, hilarious heart, her sense of humor and satire rivaling Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, Monty Python. One has previously been informed that she is prosaic and pr...