Customer Reviews

Beasts (Otto Penzler Books)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Beasts is a gothic novella set in a small New England woman's college in the 70s. It is told through the perspective of Gillian Brauer, a yearning student poet who is infatuated with her D. H. Lawrence loving professor Andre Harrow and his controversial and mysterious sculptress wife, Dorcas. Several mysteries including recurring acts of arson, a coveted but secret apprenticeship to the radical Dorcas and several students who are debilitated by mental illness are balanced through the book. The characters explore the moral boundary of the liberal time period through their sexual explorations, but this isn't a novella that seeks to exploit the titillating age of free love. Rather, it reinvents the tale of Bluebeard to create a contemporary fable of the grotesque.

This novella explores the deadly consequences of a train of thought taken too far, viciously seeking out the passionate ends of extended thoughts. Harrow and his wife take the liberal sexual attitude of DH Lawrence and act out the extreme barriers of it. Gillian enigmatically buries her responsibility in the events of her early life while simultaneously plotting the motives which form her guilt. Somehow she is left centrally pure, a passionate girl spoiled by ideas. Oates draws out the violent inner natures of her characters to show them in the light, exposing the consequences of their nature. This novella isn't subtle, Oates chooses instead to go for the extreme to show us our forgotten nightmares. It is a powerful and memorable read.

Joyce Carol Oates's newest book, "Beasts," offers the reader a suspenseful, flashback-type-of story, told from the main character, Gillian Brauer. The book is no more than 138 pages, a format where I believe Oates shines. With last year's massive novel, "Blonde" and her other latest, "Middle Age: a romance," the overly-detailed prose can make any good reader tired after a few chapters. Not to say those books are not good, because they are.

In "Beasts," Oates keeps you hooked, giving you a deep perspective on Gillian Brauer, a college student in the mid-70s, sexual attractive to her college professor, Andre Harrow. She is then drawn into Harrow and his wife's poetic, strange artistic world centered around wooden totems and a strange parrot named Xipe Totec. In the meantime, fires are being set by an arsonist around Catamount College.

After reading the book, I felt Oates could have established more of a relationship with Gillian's college friends, maybe have included a separate, brief chapter on them, but overall, the book reminded me of Philip Roth's book, "The Dying Animal."

I highly recommend "Beasts" because of Oates's unique and often horrifying look into her characters' lives. She doesn't disappoint the reader with "Beasts."

Eerie fiction, gloom and darkness, with a plot grotesque, unfolding in a lonely location, all describe this work entitled, "Beasts", and all qualify as characteristics of the Gothic novel. Joyce Carol Oates is a new author for me, but she is not one I will soon forget. This fairly brief work is unnerving at best with its characters that either are, or cross over to the depraved as either victims, or with a vague tacit admission of the willing participant.

An isolated college for women, a small group of selected students of poetry, or potential targets is drawn to a charismatic, latently evil instructor of the poetry of D. H. Lawrence. This professor/procurer uses the words of Lawrence to intrude on the privacy of his students and to intimidate them in to sharing their most intimate thoughts and experiences in writing, which then become public during class. If the story stopped here the theme of the young woman with a crush on a professor willing to exploit the same girl is hardly new literary territory. Ms. Oates takes the relationship out of the classroom and office, and transports it to a lonely isolated home. The home is of the professor and his wife, the latter who is a controversial sculptress whose work even even the most liberal viewers of the 1970's find profane, not a task easily accomplished.

Several students eventually find themselves at this residence, and despite their experiences and the permanent changes they are marked by, curiosity overcomes all fear and students continue to make the journey. What happens inside the home of the professor and his wife crosses over in to behavior and exploitation that is incredibly cruel. Gothic is almost too bland an adjective for what takes place, and certainly too mild for the permanent damage some victims suffer.

Fire plays a prominent role in this tale, whether as the topic of arson, or to sow distrust amongst friends. The ultimate conflagration the writer offers is satisfying and pyric. The book is a fascinating and disturbing read that is unquestionably excellent, if not for all readers.

Beasts crept up on me, then carried me off in its evil little teeth. Did it REALLY lead me to sin? Oh yes. Grievously. In fact, I was so anxious to see what happened next, I caught myself stealing a few sentences while driving. (Well, I HAD stopped for a red light.)

The story is not new: A college student with a professorial crush learns all about the relativity of morality--and learns it the hard way. So what makes this version of an old standard so good?

Form? Breaks every rule, yet works. Flashbacks within flashbacks, yet you can't wait for the next page.

Plot? Straightforward, yet masterful. (Check out the delicious twist at the end of the third chapter!) Builds with understatement, until you're screaming for the resolution. You get what you scream for, too. Satisfaction.

Characterization? Yes! The naivete of the protagonist balanced by the perspective of her mature counterpart. Whom you don't trust. At first. Brilliant! No indulgent and annoying digressions into secondary characters, either.

If you like subtle psychological thrillers and can live without gunshots and fistfights for a couple of hours (well, there is a knife), this book will become one of your favorites.

Beasts is the first novella that I've read by Joyce Carol Oates, and I was both discouraged and haunted after reading it. The book's premise, focusing on Gillian Brauer's obession with her professor and the twisted, bizarre relationship with him and his wife, is original. Oates does a terrific job at developing her central character, a prodigious feat in such a compact, dense genre of the novella. The plot line is engaging, as is the mysterious, liberal character of Harrow. Still, the book has its deficiencies. For example, I was dismayed not to find out more about Harrow and his wife- their past, their experiences with the other students, and what started them down such a convoluted, sordid trail of lust and debasement. ALso, Oates does not flesh out Gillian's relationships with the other characters, and she does not conclude the book decisively. That is, it would have been great to have a fuller delineation of Gillian's reflections about her college days. Still, this book was engaging, haunting, and memorable. Like Oates's previous books and short stories, Beasts is an uncanny, jarring exploration of the human psyche.

The cover of the paperback edition of this book contains detail from a 18th century painting by Henry Fussell entitled, Nightmare. Precisely the right selection, since much of the action of this novel takes place under cover of darkness, as the young women of Catamount College near the Berkshires inexorably succumb, as though under a trance, to the dark world of Andre Harrow, professor of literature at Catamount, and his wife, Dorcas, an artist specializing in the display of wood carved totems. This is a hypnotic tale; you cannot abandon Gillian once you meet her and you cannot fail to watch the evolution of her obssession with the house on Brierely (sic) Lane and the dark, manipulative couple that calls it home. More than half-way through this short, tightly written masterpiece, Joyce Carol Oates writes: "How obsession takes root, like a virulent weed." And so it does take hold of Gillian.
At the beach, the airport, at home or abroad, this superbly written tale keeps you glued. This novel, like an intense dream, absorbs you completely.

This book is haunting my thoughts days after i read it.

In 138 pages, there's not much room for action to occur - but the characters are developed just enough so you feel like you know them - but just too little that they remain mysterious and can surprise you.

It takes place on a college campus - in a woman's dorm - and in a poetry class. All of the students fall madly in love with the teacher - but the narrator also becomes fascinated and intrigued by his wife. The couple takes an interest in several of the girls - which excites them at first but ends up disastrous.

This book shows true human nature, which many people like to ignore. Joyce Carol Oates portrays people as beasts, no different than the ones that the scupltress-wife creates - which disgust and repulse the town as well as the narrator.

Most of this book is slow with little action and then the ending is explosive and left me thinking for days.

This little novella is incredible once it has time to sink in!

I recently discovered Joyce Carol Oates when my older son decided to read Freaky Green Eyes. Beasts was wonderfully written, you could almost feel the nighttime air when the girls had to leave their dorm for the fire alarms. I loved the way the characters were developed, the depth attained in such a short book was impressive, in my opinion. This is definitely a book for more mature readers. Fabulous, short, wonderful read.

Joyce Carol Oates, Beasts (Carroll and Graf, 2002)

Joyce Carol Oates cannot be human.

It is simply impossible for a single human being to turn out the work she has over the course of her career, consistently stratospheric in both quality and quantity. Her thirty-year bibliography is so vast that the major internet repository of Oates research and criticism doesn't have a full list anywhere, but is now a searchable database. Another admittedly incomplete bibliography on the web lists eighty-nine books split between novels, short story collections, and poetry, fifteen anthologies she has edited or co-edited, ten works of non-fiction, and ninety anthologies in which her work has appeared since 1980 (and those are only the horror-themed anthologies). She is the Merzbow of literature, the Sun Ra of wordcraft, both the dream and the nightmare of the bibliophile with a limited reserve of cash. The truly astounding part of all this is that one can walk into a (very well-stocked) bookshop, pick up a Joyce Carol Oates book at random, and have an odds-on chance of being rewarded with one of his finest reads of the year. Now add to this idea the fact that Oates is, for all intents and purposes, a one-trick pony, and explain how one person can write so much material on a single theme and still have it come out so very, very well.

Such is certainly the case with her recent novel Beasts. Anyone who's read Oates before, in whatever form, is liable to know a few things about this book even before cracking the cover: the main theme of the book will be human degradation. One of the characters in the book will be horrified by the degradation, even while experiencing it, and this horror will cause the character to commit some sort of extreme and socially unacceptable act. There will be a great deal of uncomfortable eroticism. Then you open the book, read the first two small chapters, and here's something new: Oates is going to tell you all this in the first four pages. It's almost as if she's throwing down the gauntlet to the reader; "you know it's coming, I know it's coming, let's see how much I can give you at the beginning and still beguile you with my novel."

And utterly beguiling it is. Gillian Brauer is a student at a small college in Massachusetts who is enamored of one of her professors. She is not alone in this, but the lengths to which she goes in her obsession with him are rather farther than the others go (in one early scene, she surreptitiously follows his wife through town, and mentions she has done this a number of times before). She knows that sometimes the professor and his wife, a sculptor whose most recent show at the school's gallery has ignited a firestorm of outrage, will sometimes allow students into their inner circle, but that these students are very tight-lipped about what goes on there. Secret society stuff at its best. Gillian, too shy to confess her love for her professor and desire to be one of those students, begins to imagine that all of her housemates in the small house/dormitory where they live, are members of the inner circle, and eventually gets to the point where she must either confront her professor or go crazy.

And that's the light, optimistic part of the novel. Things get much more fun after the confrontation.

This novel is obsessed with small. It is slim--a hundred thirty pages in the hardback edition. Gillian lives in the smallest dorm on campus and is obsessed with gaining entrance into living quarters with even fewer people. Her obsession grows when, after a semester with the professor in a normal-sized lecture class, she is admitted to one of his workshops, with only eleven students. Her classmates grow thinner over time. Small is everywhere. There is a whole (probably longer than the book itself) thesis to be written on small in here. The themes Oates taken on, on the other hand, are not small in the least, as they never are. And, as always, she does so with such style that the reader cannot help be compelled. I didn't finish this book in one sitting only because I had to go to bed last night if I wanted to have a fresh enough mind in the morning to keep involved with the story.

Gillian's professor is fond of muttering Nietzsche under his breath at odd times. Funny that Nietzsche's most famous aphorism is never mentioned in the book: "...and if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Oates has been gazing into this particular abyss for thirty years now, throwing down that gauntlet, challenging it to gaze back, and reporting on what she finds. Perhaps she will continue to do so for another thirty years, and we will continue to get such brilliant books as this. ****½

I loved every moment I spent reading this book. Dark and frightening but beautifully written. Entering a strange new mental landscape is one of the joys of reading. This is one of several books that rewarded me in that area.