Night. Sleep. Death. the Stars.

March 1, 2020

In a small city in upstate New York, John Earle "Whitey" McClaren, 67-year-old former mayor and pillar of the community, attempts to intervene in an unprovoked police assault on an unarmed man of color. For his Good Samaritan efforts, he is tasered multiple times and suffers a stroke. Oates has set her latest novel in 2010, before the widespread use of body cams and before police brutality had fully entered into the national conversation. That Whitey himself becomes a victim seems like a flaw in the premise; as a white man, the same confidence and privilege that allow him to unthinkingly step into the conflict without fearing for his safety would likely have protected him from assault by the racist cops. That aside, Whitey's dispatch in the first chapter lets him become a cipher for his wife and five adult children, from whose perspective the rest of the nearly 800-page novel is told. Whitey was a towering, patriarchal figure, and his family members all defined themselves in relation to him. In his absence, they become unmoored and even unhinged. VERDICT A poetic meditation on psychological trauma and a complex and nuanced portrait of a grieving family.--Lauren Gilbert, Center for Jewish History, New York

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Starred review from March 9, 2020
Oates’s quintessential examination of grief (after Pursuit) draws on the closing lines of Walt Whitman’s “A Clear Midnight,” which reverberate and reappear throughout this weighty chronicle of a family’s reckoning with the death of a father and husband. John Earle “Whitey” McClaren, the 67-year-old “lynchpin” of a Hudson, N.Y., family, and longtime mayor of a nearby town, is tased, beaten, and suffers a stroke after he intervenes during an incident of police brutality against Azim Murthy, a stranger to Whitey whom he registers as a “dark-skinned young man.” Oates’s dispassionate description of the scene peels back the layers of fear and assumption that led the police to treat Azim and Whitey so brutally, retelling the events from Azim’s point of view. After Whitey dies, Jessalyn, his 61-year old widow, and their five squabbling children struggle to pick up the pieces. While Jessalyn casts about in semi-coherence—“stumbling through the illogic of a primitive philosopher just discovering quasi-paradoxes of being, existence, nothingness and the (limited) capacity of language to express these”—her children fear she is approaching a nervous breakdown. More concerning to them is the presence of Hugo Martinez, a mustachioed 59-year-old poet and their mother’s new suitor, who recites the Whitman poem during an awkward Thanksgiving dinner, and whom they fear will jeopardize their inheritance even as his presence has a life-affirming affect on their mother. With precise, authoritative prose that reads like an inquest written by a poet (“death makes of all that is familiar, unfamiliar”), Oates keep the reader engaged throughout the sprawling narrative. This is a significant and admirable entry in the Oates canon.

April 1, 2020
An already frayed family disintegrates in the wake of a tragedy. Oates doesn't always write long, but when she does, as in The Accursed (2013), the story enfolds a wealth of detail. Whether all of it is necessary is debatable. In this instance, John Earle McLaren, a respected elder in a small New York town, formerly its mayor, stops to admonish two cops who are rousting a "dark-skinned" motorist. Tased to the ground, McLaren spends what's left of his life in the hospital, though it takes a few signatures for Oates to finish him off. The event draws together his very different children, who had always "contended for the father's attention." It wasn't that Whitey, as he was widely known, was a cold fish so much as he was committed to the notion of being self-sufficient--and secretive, too, as the hidden bank accounts that turn up after his passing demonstrate. Meanwhile, daughter Beverly in particular is incensed that the siblings she regards as unworthy receive equal shares of the inheritance while Jessalyn, their mother, is set for life. Death pulls brothers and sisters together and apart. The most likable (and completely realized) character is son Virgil, who disconsolately flirts with death himself--"He'd drowned, but not died. Died, but was still here." Daughter Lorene, too, a high school principal, undergoes a transformation that makes her at once more vulnerable and more human. Oates' storyline would be the stuff of comedy in other hands--think of the recent movie Knives Out, for instance--but she makes of it a brooding, thoughtful study of how people respond to stress and loss, which is not always well and not always nicely. Yet, somehow, everyone endures, some experience unexpected happiness, and the story ends on a note that finds hope amid sorrow and division. Long and diffuse, but, as with all Oates, well worth reading.

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Starred review from April 15, 2020
Ever the Good Samaritan, John Earle Whitey McClaren pulls his car to the side of the expressway outside his hometown of Hammond, New York, when he witnesses police officers using excessive force on a Black man. A former mayor who assumes he still has some clout in civic affairs, Whitey believe his presence will deescalate the situation. Instead, the cops turn their Tasers and steel-toed boots on Whitey, leaving him writhing on the ground. It's an attack a younger man would have trouble surviving, but at 67, it's more than Whitey can withstand. He succumbs to his injuries, ones his family has been told he suffered from a stroke while driving. His death catapults Jessalyn, his wife of more than 40 years, and his five grown children into the heartbreak of grief in all its stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and eventually, acceptance. Without Whitey, a kind of fixture had slipped. A lynchpin. Things were veering out of control. Indeed, each sibling worries about and meddles in their mother's well-being yet remains oblivious to the downward trajectories of their own lives. While Oates purposefully plumbs the depths of each family member's agonizing loss, her perceptive study of Jessalyn's widowhood stands out as an impressive and impassioned portrait of this distressing life journey.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)