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Summary
Summary
"Timely, monumental. . . . Yet another piercing examination of American culture by the writer this reviewer considers our country's greatest living novelist. . . . It is brilliant. How blessed we are to have her as a novelist in our chaotic, confusing times. Night is spot on for these times of racial divide, as well as in portraying the fractious family dynamic that many of us know all too well. . . . Night deserves the top spot on your quarantine nightstand. Here's a fervent salute to Oates, our finest American novelist, for this one." -- Star Tribune
The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society by one of our most enduringly popular and important writers
Night Sleep Death The Stars is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all.
Stark and penetrating, Joyce Carol Oates's latest novel is a vivid exploration of race, psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing, as well as an intimate family novel in the tradition of the author's bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys.
Author Notes
Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Syracuse University and a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin.
She is the author of numerous novels and collections of short stories. Her works include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Bellefleur, You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, Because It Is My Heart, Solstice, Marya : A Life, and Give Me Your Heart. She has received numerous awards including the National Book Award for Them, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature. She was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her title Lovely, Dark, Deep. She also wrote a series of suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. In 2015, her novel The Accursed became listed as a bestseller on the iBooks chart.
She worked as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, before becoming the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She and her late husband Raymond J. Smith operated a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (June)
Guardian Review
Words spill from Joyce Carol Oates with fabled prolificacy. In a career spanning more than half a century, the laurelled American author has published more than a hundred books, including volumes of poetry and essays, plays and numerous bestselling novels. An enviable backlist, except that its sheer bulk and range has sometimes led her to be taken for granted. Oates's literary agility proves oddly problematic in the latest addition to her oeuvre, too. At nearly a thousand pages long, Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. is one of her more ambitious novels. An immersive, discursive chronicle of a family's reconfiguration following the death of its patriarch, it borrows its title from Walt Whitman's poem A Clear Midnight, about the soul's release back into the universe, and an otherworldly chord resonates through portions of its narrative. Despite its bulk, this is a novel that doesn't so much sprawl as scamper, at times darting purposefully off in the direction of a deadpan comedy of manners, a courtroom drama, a philosophical enquiry into the nature of art. It also provides a timely as well as damning snapshot of race relations and police brutality in the US. "Whitey" McClaren is the well-liked former mayor of a modest city in upstate New York, but his local standing counts for nothing when, spotting two cops viscously assaulting a "dark-skinned young man" on the hard shoulder, he pulls over to intervene. The 67-year-old good samaritan saves a life but is kicked to the ground and Tasered at close range, suffering a stroke. Without its "linchpin", the McClaren family soon careens out of control. For Jessalyn, his adored wife of nearly 40 years, Whitey's loss signals the end of her life. Except that she's somehow still living. After she adopts a burly, squint-eyed feral tomcat and takes up with a moustachioed Puerto Rican artist, her five grown kids plot an intervention. Worrying about Jessalyn takes their minds off their own problems only temporarily, for as Sophia, the youngest daughter, confides: "If my mother changes into another person, the rest of us won't know who we are." As a scientist, Sophia uses her steady hand to kill scores of lab animals, turning them into data - a job she's suddenly questioning. The two eldest children, Whitey's once-handsome heir, Thom, and former prom queen Beverly, are trapped in stale marriages. Self-medicating with booze and letting off steam with violence both verbal and physical, they veer close to caricature, and middle child Lorene - a misanthropic high-school principal - is equally hard to warm to. It's youngest son Virgil who is the most complex McClaren. An artsy hobo, he is without vanity "as an infant is without vanity, enthralled by its own mere being". Virgil brings out a steely sharpness in Oates's prose, whether she's describing his attire ("both dramatic and silly, like a costume") or his phobias ("elevator claustrophobia is just family life, condensed"). In a weirdly prescient twist, he will become haunted by a missed opportunity to use hand sanitiser. There is much to relish in Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars., from its nimble pace to exuberant set pieces. As a portrait of a family and a nation, it's funny and tragic and sometimes bleak. Indeed, if there's fault to be found it's simply that the novel reads like multiple books in one, and, inevitably, some of its narrative strands get passed over too quickly. This is particularly true of the sections dealing with police racism and its fallout. Though they're vividly rendered, in order for the novel to hang together as a whole they must ultimately be subsumed by the overarching narrative, that all-American quest for self-realisation. In this case, the self-realisation of privileged white people. Given the intense topicality conferred by George Floyd's murder and the subsequent protests, it makes for an uncomfortable juxtaposition.
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
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.
