Missing Mom

Nikki, an upstate New York feature writer, tells the story of life as the daughter of Gwen, recently widowed and given to a homey gentility. Gwen is subsequently murdered, but the book is less a murder mystery than a self-absorbed narrative, by a not particularly likable main character. Listeners might expect that a novel read by the wonderful Anna Fields and written by the incomparable Oates would knock their socks off. The novel starts out with Oates's usual expertise, but then things become tedious and disappointing. Anna Fields provides a valiant, emotional reading, but not even she can present an unbearably long list of the word WHY without its becoming tiresome. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

August 8, 2005
Oates's latest returns to upstate New York's Mount Ephraim, the setting of We Were the Mulvaneys
, Oates's 1996 novel—a 2001 Oprah
pick—about one family's privilege and decay. This time, Oates turns to the middle class: narrator Nikki Eaton, 31, is a reporter for the smalltown Beacon
and her family's black sheep. She's having an affair with a married DJ; she barely tolerates her widowed mother, Gwen, and her homemaker sister, Clare. As the novel opens, Nikki arrives at Gwen's Mother's Day party with newly spiked, "inky-maroon" hair and contempt for Gwen's cooking, one-story house and endless munificence to her ragtag guests. Two days later, Gwen is murdered by an ex-con. Chronicling Nikki's year following Gwen's death, the novel includes some wonderfully precise emotional observations. But more often the prose sags beneath the weight of banal information and a story line too redolent of pulp. Naturally, the "swarthy" police detective investigating Gwen's murder initially seems repulsive, and naturally, in the novel's final pages, Nikki thinks: "I had not noticed in the past how strong his profile was." There are no surprises, that's for sure. And yet the novel is so conventional and relentlessly detailed that it can't help showing its characters behaving in ways that resonate.