Carthage

Starred review from November 18, 2013
Oates (The Accursed) returns with another novel that ratchets up the unsettling to her signature feverish pitch. Beginning with an attention-grabbing opener that begets addictive reading—Zeno Mayfield and a search party are on the hunt for Mayfield’s missing 19-year-old daughter, Cressida, in the Adirondack woods—the story chronicles the creepy circumstances surrounding the girl’s assumed murder. Was she, as many in the upstate New York town of Carthage suspect, beaten to death and dumped in the Black River by her older sister’s ex-fiancé, Brett Kincaid, a decorated Iraqi War vet? Or did she, the “dark twisty” daughter prone to excessive self-loathing, play some perverse role in her own disappearance? What transports the story beyond a carefully crafted whodunit is Oates’s dogged exploration of each character’s culpability in the case, which spans nearly seven years. Between Kincaid’s noncoerced but PTSD-fueled confession and Cressida’s feelings that her family didn’t understand or love her enough (the source of her long-suppressed desire to escape from them), nearly everyone can somehow be held responsible for the supposed crime—and seen as its unintended victim. When the truth and its fallout finally becomes clear at the end, the mood is not surprisingly claustrophobic and grim. Once again, Oates’s gift for exposing the frailty—and selfishness—of humans is on display.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most distinguished figures in American letters, and her matchless prose is best enjoyed when spoken aloud. The husband-and-wife team of Susan Ericksen and David Colacci are gifted professionals who narrate this novel and embroil us in the tragedy of the Mayfield family, whose younger daughter, the one they call "the smart one," goes missing. Some of the most memorable portrayals in this stream-of-consciousness story include the older sister's protestation of love for her wounded and psychologically damaged fiancé, the mother's shaken voice as she tries to accept her daughter's disappearance, and the soldier's haunted tones as he remembers the horrors of his service in Iraq. This is a disturbing yet compelling listening experience, and its narrators show us the complexity of human experience. D.L.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine