Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart [Paperback]

Joyce Carol Oates (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 1990

Joyce Carol Oates is in full fire here. The motifs and themes of this rich, intricately textured, realistic novel belong to the American experience of the 1950s and '60s. But the vision of life that animates them is so clear and unflinching that the past comes to us with the force of revelation. "Fiction of extraordinary imaginative power."--The New York Times Book Review. Nominated for the National Book Award.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Murder galvanizes an industrial town in upstate New York when a husky red-haired corpse is fished from a polluted river in 1956. With sure strokes, Oates ( American Appetites ) delineates the racial hatreds leading to the crime that then entangles black basketball hero Verlyn ("Jinx") Fairchild and blonde Iris Courtney. Their coming of age from the mid-'50s to the mid-'60s--in the shadow of the civil rights struggle and John F. Kennedy's assassination--their love and their unpremeditated complicity in the town's violence are brilliantly portrayed. Jinx, appealing in his "innocence and impotence," can't help himself or his brother, Sugar Baby, wrecked by drug dealing. Iris, alert, locked into icy detachment, watches Jinx suffer, while her own alcoholic mother and gambling father drift apart. Blotting out her problems, Iris sleepwalks into the household of the exotic Savages, art historians who prize her beauty. Oates is a master at realizing the social forces that twist the fates of her characters. BOMC dual main selection.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The ever-prolific Oates is on familiar ground in her newest novel, which treats the seedy side of a working-class city in upstate New York in the 1950s. Her heroine will be familiar to Oates fans, too: Iris Courtney is the only child of a broken home, gambling father, and alcoholic mother; she's waif-like, intelligent, and sensitive and carries with her the air of a victim. When a black classmate--handsome, academic, athletic Jinx Fairchild--murders mean "white trash" Little Red Garlock to protect Iris from Red's lewd advances, Iris carries the secret through her adolescence. The Courtney, Garlock, and Fairchild families are here used to explore racism at a time of awakening social consciousness, but Iris alone seems fully imagined. A large, significant work that will please Oates fans. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/89.
- Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 405 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult (April 30, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525248609
• ISBN-13: 978-0525248606
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,945,747 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Place to Start, October 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (Plume) (Paperback)

In her long, wildly prolific career, Oates has turned out multiple masterpieces (Them, Wonderland, Bellefleur, You Must Remember This, We Were the Mulvaneys) and even more near-masterpieces (What I Lived For, American Appetites, Expensive People, Zombie, Son of the Morning, Black Water, Broke Heart Blues) making it difficult for the beginner to know where to jump in. I'd suggest this novel, a flawlessly written, absorbingly complex study of troubled youth and race relations in a period of American history (the 1960's) that Oates can write about with as much authority as the most insightful sociologist. Eschewing pat conclusions and sentimentality, she renders a heartbreaking tale of innocence lost and expectations unfulfilled with an electric energy that carries the reader head-first down a narrative path that is as moving as it is difficult. The characters here are utterly real and their struggles to maintain some sense of identity in the face of massive social upheavel is depicted with uncommon sensitivity and grace. Oates is a master of the realist novel, and this is her finest in that vein and, indeed, in any vein. Shamefully neglected by awards committess and by the general reading public upon its release, Because it is Bitter will no doubt emerge as a classic of 20th century fiction, a work that probes, with unflinching honesty and unsurpassed skill, the depths of the human heart.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Oates's best, December 19, 2000

By 

Matthew Cheney (New Hampton, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (Plume) (Paperback)

This gripping, powerful novel is one of the best Joyce Carol Oates has written -- and that's saying a lot, since she has published about 30 novels, some of them as good as anything by an American in the last fifty years (and, to be honest, some of them as bad).

You can read the novel simply to become absorbed in the events and characters, or you can read it as a study of morality, of the implications of race and gender, of violence and American dreams. I've read it three times, and each time I have come away more impressed with Oates's achievement. This is a stunningly vivid work -- her command of English prose here is at a level reached with her earlier realistic novels, Wonderland and them. Give yourself over to the writing, and you will truly feel every page of this book.

A warning, though: It's not an uplifting story, despite an ostensibly happy ending. The characters suffer, and the world they inhabit is brutal and unforgiving. But the pain is not without meaning, and moments in this story reach heights of tragedy which few American writers have scaled.

Even if you've hated things you've by Joyce Carol Oates in the past, don't dismiss this novel. It will dig itself into your consciousness.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Because it is Brilliant, November 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (Plume) (Paperback)

People often say that a book was so good they couldn't put it down ... well this was so good I had to put it down, so I could absorb it and think about it and savour it. Oates delves so deeply into her characters it's almost painful. They are wonderfully human and believable. The story -- about how a murder binds together two teens, a poor white girl and a star black male athlete -- evokes working class America, in this case industrial upstate New York. Enjoyable and emotional.