Customer Reviews

The Barrens

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Although this novel has some Oates-ian touches, this is not a typical Joyce Carol Oates novel, which is presumably where the "Writing as Rosamund Smith" tagline comes into play. The basic plot is pretty much what you'd expect from an Oates novel: Matt McBride, a thirty-six year old man haunted by the abduction and murder of a young girl that occured when he was fifteen, becomes obsessed with the disappreance of a young woman who lives nearby. Matt sinks further into obsession at the cost of his marriage and career, but he won't rest until he finds out exactly what has happened to Duana Zwolle.

Oates also takes us tinto the mind of the killer, Name Unknown. Name Unknown has an obsession of his own -- ridding the world of impure, vulgar women. The passages written from Name Unknown's point of view are somewhat reminiscent of the narrative voice of Quentin P___ from Oates's earlier novel, Zombie. However, while Name Unknown's thoughts and actions are disturbing, they are nowhere near as frightening as the things Quentin does.

The Barrens also has a more satisfying conclusion -- almost a happy ending -- than many of Oates's novels. I'm reluctant to call this novel "Joyce Carol Oates Lite" because that sounds demeaning. However, while this book is dark, it doesn't get nearly as dark as the aforementioned Zombie, or Foxfire, or a number of other Oates novels. It's a book to be kept in reserve for those times when you want a compelling thriller, but not necessarily one that's going to make you think too hard about what Oates is trying to say.

The best of the Rosamond Smith / Oates mysteries. It strikes me as amazing that a writer as good (and exponentially prolific) as Oates can get better, but she does. Her recent forays, including The Barrens and Blonde, are so deliciously subtle in their presentation of characters' thought patterns and multiple levels of motives, that it leaves me staggering with respect for her skills. In her biography, some light is shed on her writing process. Oates seems to eat and breathe writing. She will pick up her manuscript in a taxi and continue scribbling exactly where she left off. The command she exerts over her craft shows in this book. She has mastered the form of paranoid mystery. Her characters ooze their deviant personalities. Even her hero in this book has a deep streak of manic perversity.

If you want to know what goes through the mind of serial killers, read The Barrens and her previous book in this Smith series, Starbright will be with you soon. If you enjoy accessible literary excellence and riveted to your seat bones fiction, you can't go wrong with JCO.

The Barrens puts other novels that masquerade as "compelling psycho-dramas" (think anything sold at the grocery store or on the mass paperback table at chain bookstores) to literary shame. For nearly two decades, JCO has been one of a handful of writers whose works I purchase in hardcover the day they become available. So, make no mistake, by any measure against other writers' work, this is a five-star read: suspenseful, harrowing, "true."

But when I think about the body of work Oates has penned under the pseudonym "Rosamond Smith," I find that The Barrens falls short of the excellence she has achieved in this genre in, for example, Nemesis and Lives of the Twins.

Also (and now perhaps I am being unfair by comparing her Smith work to her Oates work), I think JCO presents readers with a far more memorable psychopath in the groundbreaking (and chillingly realistic) Zombie, a slim volume that reminds us that serial killers are people, too.

Joyce Carol Oates's ventures into genre writing often come with a twist. While the subtitle of this book is "A Novel of Suspense," it doesn't fall into the thriller side of the genre; instead, it's more creepy and troubling than suspenseful. (Similarly, her "Middle Age," subtitled "A Romance," is a satire of suburban lives linked by a dead man--hardly the stuff of romance.) In all her novels, Oates shatters our preconceptions about plot and genre and instead worms her way into the minds and lives of her characters.

In "The Barrens," she introduces us to two artists with lethally divergent tastes. Matt McBride doubles as real estate broker (his day job) and as Nighthawk, a photographer of the dark. He gradually realizes that it is his owl-like existence that gives him more satisfaction than his salaried profession or, for that matter, his wife and kids. Joseph Gavin is an artist by day (who goes by the rather silly alias, "Name Unknown"), but the impulse for his horrific "masterpiece" springs from his second career as a serial killer.

McBride's and Gavin's lives cross twice: with Gavin's first victim, a high school student whom McBride knew as a teenager, and with his latest victim, a local artist whom McBride met socially (and perhaps more?). The result is a perverse dance of hunted and hunter, and Oates alternates the perspective between Gavin, whose internal logic belies a poisonous madness, and McBride, who is flirting with the edge of sanity himself. Oates's investigation of McBride's descent into a psychological maelstrom is wholly convincing. The creepiness factor crawls in when McBride's obsessive pursuit turns into a bizarre and unsettling empathy for the murderer.

From the outset, we know who is innocent and who is guilty--of the murders, at least. But guilt is a messed-up emotion. The police, who don't even know about McBride's tenuous connection to the first murder, suspect him of the latest killing--in no small part because McBride becomes infatuated with the lives of the victims as well as of their killer. One of the scenes the author describes pitch-perfectly is McBride's interrogation by the detectives; he is torn by the absoluteness of his innocence, his unreliable memories, his fear of what his family and colleagues might think, and the feeling that he might be guilty of something.

Unfortunately, Oate's portrayal of Gavin borders on eye-rolling caricature; it's an incongruous, cartoonish portrayal right out of one of Thomas Harris's lesser novels. The language in these passages, filtered through the mind of a mad loner, seems often off-kilter: "In exactitude and patience he had taken her one morning." "These words were a girl's uttered in surprise and vexation." (Exactitude? Vexation?) Each of the killer's tirades, filled with biblical allusions and anatomical "exactitude," serves only to interrupt the compelling study of McBride's meltdown. The book would certainly have been much better (and, perhaps, filled with far more "suspense") if Oates had left Gavin's character the mystery.

As a 25 year intensive Oates reader, I found "The Barrens" particularly interesting and engaging. In this book, Joyce continues her investigatory writing on two main themes that are ubiquitous in her "Rosamond Smith" books. These two themes being: The Mental Processes Of Serial Killers AND Identical Twins

Joyce is fascinated by the telepathic interactions of identical twins. This has been heavily documented, both scientifically and empirically and Joyce interweaves the concept into her plot with great aplomb in this book. Additionally, the book is reminiscent of "Zombie", but in a more ordered and mass market style of writing. While this seems to have been Joyce's original intent writing under this Nom De Plume, this minor charade seems now to have been all but abandoned as the first edition now lists the author as Joyce Carol Oates writing as Rosamund Smith. Marketing wins in the end.

Nonetheless, the book represented an elevation of literary style when writing under her "Rosamond Smith Cloak" now that it has been exposed to reveal below, 'The Invisible Writer' hiding behind the "Wizard of Oz's Curtain." Perhaps this shall herald a new area for Joyce to develop yet another literary expertise.

I would highly recommend the book to any suspense novel enthusiasts, and of course, to all Joyce Carol Oates readers around the world.

This is the first JC Oates book that I didn't enjoy. Written under one of her pen names, Rosamond Smith, this less-than-engaging thriller centred on a thirty-something real estate agent Matt McBride, who is forced to confront his memories of the abduction and murder of his high school crush, when a young female artist disappears.

Matt's connection and attraction to this missing girl is never fully nor convincingly explained, which leaves the reader wondering about his obsession with her. Did he or did he not have a relationship with her? It appears even Oates did not quite know. His deteriorating relationship with his wife is also rather sketchily played out. Although there was some attempt to address Niezsche's quote 'Ultimately one loves one's desire, not the desired object', this was also rather hastily inserted with Matt's transference of attraction to the missing girl's twin.

Perhaps this novel was not written in Oates's name for good reason - it bore none of her incisive characterisation and breadth and depth of her other works. Definitely an off-day effort by an otherwise accomplished writer.

Adults tend to see serial killers as replacements for the monsters of their childhoods. Something about how those mysterious killers strike time-after-time without being seen, often going years before being caught, if ever caught at all, reminds them of the monsters they imagined under their beds and in their closets. We never see them but they scare the hell out of us because we know they are out there somewhere.

Joyce Carol Oates, writing as Rosamond Smith in her 2001 book, "The Barrens," explores the long history of one New Jersey serial killer who, almost despite himself, gets away with murder for a very long time. Unbeknownst to the killer, this time, though, his snatch-and-murder of a young woman will also claim a male victim, a young family man who for the second time in his life becomes obsessed with one of the killer's victims.

Matt McBride has built a good life for his wife and two sons in wealthy Weymouth, New Jersey, where he is a hugely successful real estate agent. McBride, however, is unable to forget a high school classmate whose mutilated body was discovered in the swampy New Jersey Pine Barrens not far from the school they both attended. Though he barely knew the girl, McBride still feels guilty that he did not save her from her fate.

Twenty years later, this time in Weymouth, another young woman with whom he was barely acquainted disappears, and McBride's old nightmares return stronger than ever. Driven to find the killer, no matter the cost to his marriage, job or family, Matt McBride begins his own investigation into the woman's disappearance despite the fact that certain Weymouth detectives believe he himself might be her killer.

The suspense builds as Oates brings McBride and the killer closer and closer together in alternating chapters told from the points-of-view of the two men. As the official police investigation goes nowhere, a violent confrontation between McBride and the killer seems inevitable, the only question being which, if either of them, will survive the showdown.

"The Barrens" does not make for quick reading because of the rambling, at times almost incoherent, style Oates uses for the chapters written in the killer's voice. In fact, although the book is short of three hundred pages in length, it seems longer because of the extra effort it requires of its readers. Oates is not known for painting pretty pictures or crafting happy endings for her novels and here she fills Weymouth with flawed characters intent on making the most of their shallow lifestyles. Surprisingly, however, she has written an ending for "The Barrens" that can be characterized, for her, as a happy one - strange though it is.

Not a very good novel. The characters were sketches (when Oates---writing here as "Rosamund Smith"---has the demonstrated capacity to bring fictional men and women to life) the plot was flat and far from original, the circumstances about which this book was concerned were uninteresting, the violence was neither repulsively shocking nor mentally interesting, and I felt no kinship for the main character, his plight, his inner demons, or his motivations, artistic and retributive. Since the identity of the killer active in the New Jersey pine barrens was revealed early on, there wasn't even room left for suspense or mystery, so one read The Barrens merely to...well...see what Oates did with this tale. And what she did was drag a potentially fine short story out to nearly three-hundred ultimately unfulfilling pages. It's hard to believe the same person who wrote Zombie only a decade ago could turn out another "murderer on the loose" book so inferior to its predecessor. As I said in my title, this time-killer is a letdown.

Not quite, those are the two words which best sum up The Barrens. It's not quite a good suspense novel, the reader has to slog through a little too much for the suspense to hold. It's not quite a good study on twins. In fact, all you get on this is a little bit of ranting on the living twin's part near the end of the book (by which time you have done so much 'slogging' through that you no longer care). It's not quite a good study on relationships and the facades of society. Possibly this was the best part of the book, but it still ends up too thin.

The Barrens had lots of potential. It could have been a great suspense novel or a great book about the psychology of twins or a great book about relationships, but the Joyce Carol Oates seemed to have wanted it to be all of these things. The result is that it ends up being none of these things.

I was not convinced by the main character's motivation for being obessesed with solving crimes that involved victims that he didn't even know. I was bored to tears with the killer's nutty rants punishing women. They don't contribute anything to the book and as a result end up bloating it further. I was somewhat interested in how Matt's marriage to a social climbing wife was falling apart as a result of this obession, but this isn't well developed.

Over all, The Barrens offers little to most readers, because none will be fully satisfied with any part of this book. I slogged through this book in two days, but only because I wanted to hurry up and get it over with (because I detest leaving a book unfinished and I kept hoping that it would redeem itself at some point).

I feel like I am breaking one of the commandments by giving a JCO book a bad review, but I did not like this book.

I think the premise and plot were good, but I felt like I was wading in mud when reading it. The writing never seemed flow, never reached a good rhythm.

If flow and pace are important to you when you read a thriller or suspense novel, look elsewhere.