Customer Reviews

Bellefleur

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates is ranked as one of my most favorite novels of all time; I savored this gothic tale cover to cover and didn't want it to end. It possesses a life of it's own, the characters became ghosts that would haunt me after setting it aside after a short reading and I would look forward to picking it up again. After I finished it, I felt homesick in a peculiar way that no book has ever done to me before; it is very likely that I will revisit the pages of Bellefleur again. Each chapter is an opulent sliver of time that peers into the lives and thoughts of the residents of Bellefleur Manor, an American family of notorious distinction. Their history is rife with joys and sorrows deftly exposed by the astounding craft that is signature in JCO's prolific literary career. The mesmerizing shifts of time, like historical memories, travel from the heights of the imposing Mount Blanc, wind through the decadent rooms of Bellefleur Manor, and plunge into the depths of mysterious Lake Noir where disconcerting spirits dwell. The fanciful characters endear themselves because of their human vitality and cause despair because of their human flaws; they are very tangible and seductive in spite of the brief glimpses into their lives. This is not a book for the faint of heart for it isn't a serene walk in the walled garden of Bellefleur Manor. JCO reveals the grotesque that exists within the soul of the American dream, and with abrupt grace she divulges the unforeseen twists of fate that arise with incredible violence that will leave you reeling with astonishment. It is a unique and contemplative tale, not to be consumed in a few sittings; however, the temptation of the eloquent prose begs to be gorged until the reader is sated. Open this book and open your mind, and give your imagination a workout. If you read this book with a rigid, black and white mind-set you will come away frustrated by it. I highly recommend this novel to anyone who is looking for something out of the ordinary to read.

Next to Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, Bellefleur has been the most entertaining and absording book I have ever read. Forget the meandering chronology, forget the "plot": this book is like a prosaic photo album of an extraordinary and haunted family that will leave you entirely drawn in. I picked this book up on a whim and am so glad I did, I find myself thinking about the characters still many months after reading it. For everyone who loves 100 Years of Solitude (and everyone else!), this book is an absolute must read.

I will admit from the outset that I am NOT a diehard Joyce Carol Oates fan, but in this book she manages to retain all of her strengths (her poetry, her characterizations) and somehow minimize all of her weaknesses (most notably what seems to be a real masochistic/sadistic streak--check out Blonde, for example). I've always read this as an homage of some sort to Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, and even in comparison to the masterpiece that THAT book is--this well holds it own. It might even be better. (And if you can't sacrifice chronology to theme every once in a while, well, you might as well be reading Danielle Steele.)

For me this is simply the finest novel ever penned, by anyone. Oates manages to capture a sweeping family saga and combine it with a living, breathing landscape in the shape the Chautaugua Valley. Bellefleur is a massive mansion in which generations of an American family have lived, died and prospered. Oates manages to hold onto the many narrative threads, interweave them and then bring the whole pattern to a dramatic and devastating conclusion. Simply awesome.

I find myself always swept along in the exquiste flow of Oates prose; reading this book was no exception. The problem, ultimately, is that this river really doesn't go anywhere. I kept reading and reading, in the (vain)hope that the legion of Bellefleur ancestors brought to life by Ms. Oates would somehow bring the crises of the most current generation into focus and illuminate some kind of significant narrative trajectory. It never materialized for me. It's very possible that I missed essential clues and themes in the individual chapters. However, if they were there as part of some cohesive plan on Ms. Oates part, I didn't discern them. I thought about spending more time trying to tease out of the text some kind of larger meaning, but decided in the end that it just wasn't worth my time.
I would have given this book four stars except that Ms. Oates has set the bar much higher herself with several of her earlier works, which most certainly are worth the time.

Joyce Carol Oates weaves unforgettable characters and fantastic storylines into this 500+ page masterpiece. Of the thousands of pages of fiction I read each year her characters remain the longest and most prominent in my memory. If you love a great story I highly recommend Bellefleur

I don't exactly mean my title up there as a slam, because Bellefleur rewards a reader who takes the extreme effort of stepping inside its strange, insular world, but it took me four tries to finish it. I had a friend who gave up after starting the novel twice and losing steam at the same point, roughly at page one-hundred. His attention span, I'll note, was at least an equal to my own. What is it about this daunting volume in JCO's original gothic trilogy that proves so kicking to the literary butt? I have no clue. It is not slow-moving, nor is it any more dense than many of her other works, but there is a force of willpower within this book that almost seems to repel a reader. Weird but it's almost like that. Oates' sweeping morality play about one inbred, gloriously accomplished family in upstate New York, their nation-sized estate, and the interlinking tales of the lives of these cousins, siblings, married couples and distant, mythic forebears, sweeps along with the force of a flood, but as one learns about the clan and how they came to possess all they do, living nearly as exiled lords and ladies in a forgotten corner of a democracy, the sensation becomes that of wading in freshly-poured cement. If anyone knows exactly why this thick novel is so hard to break open, I'm up for theories. I'll close off by saying Bellefleur is unique, even among Oates' canon, and it is probably the toughest expedition into a single volume of literature I can imagine.

Ah, beautiful, terrible Bellefleur, a manor (One mustn't call it a castle in the New World, though characters herein do so anyway.) nestled between Lake Noir below and Mount Blanc above containing the beautiful, terrible family of Bellefleurs: eccentric, depraved, aristocratic (if one is allowed to speak thus). If I had one adjective to choose to describe this novel it would be "lush." Of course, there are deeper, darker, more foetid, swampier things with which to contend here. Pay attention to the opening quote from the philosopher Heraclitus, most famous for his doctrine that, "Everything is change." And pay especial heed to lines like these from Jeremiah Bellefleur, "You talk of haunted things, but what of those of us who know themselves haunted things - haunted things in human form?" Aren't we all?

Ms. Oates herself calls this Gothic sprawl of a book "parodistic" in retort to the charge that it is a Gothic parody of some sort. After finishing it, I can't imagine the a discerning reader who fails to realise the distinction to which she adverts. What a strange yet familiar world we come upon here. As described by Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II, "The castle...the castle's grounds...the lightless choppy immensity of lake Noir...the thousands upon thousands of acres of wilderness land...the mountains in the distance: a terror to contemplate: and beyond them, sprawling out on all sides, a greater horror, that entity glibly referred to as the world. What maddened mind, deranged by an unspeakable lust, had imagined all this into being...?"

Step into the world, reader, the Bellefleur world, which you may find - to your delight and terror - is startlingly like your own.

The first of Oates's several "Gothic" sagas, "Bellefleur" is one of my favorite--perhaps the favorite--of her countless novels. A multi-generational chronicle of the rise and fall and aborted rise again of an upstate New York family, it borrows and develops devices from such American writers as Irving, Hawthorne, and Cooper and updates them with echoes of modern writers ranging from Faulkner to Garcia Marquez. Her story hops back and forth in time, revealing family secrets, legends, triumphs, and disappointments, as well as following the travails of a few truly tragic figures. (It's one of those novels that force you to flip forward frequently to the family tree.) At its center is Leah, the ambitious "uncontested queen of the household" who endeavors to restore the Bellefleur holdings to a legendary and expansive splendor.

On one hand, Oates presents us with the utter zaniness of various members of the Bellefleur clan, including an ancestor who impulsively takes off to seek God's presence and live as an unwashed hermit in the mountains, a "troll" adopted by the family who becomes their most sycophantic servant, a child prodigy who shuts himself up in one of the castle's towers and pours out invention after brilliant invention, and a terrifyingly feral rat-like furball that turns out to be an enigmatically perceptive cat. On the other hand, as John Gardner points out in his review of the novel, "What drives Miss Oates's fiction is her phobias: that is, her fear that normal life may suddenly turn monstrous." And the monstrous abounds. But the murders, the massacres, the disappearances, the illnesses, the tragedies--each of which is horrific enough--are still not as compelling and terrible as the effects these incidents have on the family as a whole and on each of its sons and daughters.

In spite of the realism of Oates's descriptions (most apparent in the passages describing the natural wonderland that comprises the estate and in the scenes outlining the family's social and political milieu), the novel abounds in the improbable and the magical: age is malleable, mountains change heights, coincidences pile up, a local vulture carries away babies, various characters have psychic powers--not to mention the gnomes (or dwarfs or trolls) playing in a nearby field. Perfectly pleasant children unexpectedly commit unconscionably evil acts, an elderly aunt hides herself away in her bedroom, a century's worth of neighbors plot revenge for the least perceived slights, a certain room remains locked for more than seventy-five years because of some unspoken past tragedy. (The domineering Leah aside, the novel's real center may well be the castle itself, a garish atrocity from the family's earliest beginnings in America.) Everything leads to the cataclysm of the finale, followed by a coda recounting the choice made 150 years earlier that saved the Bellefleurs from total extinction after a similarly devastating event. True to the Gothic tradition, the untold sequel is foretold by the family's haunted and tragic past.

It's taken me 21 years to finally get around to reading "Bellefleur" and it's classic Joyce Carol Oates... I must say that it wasn't one of the fastest reads chiefly because I was flummoxed from page one by the chronology. Because the characters in the family tree didn't have birthdates or death dates should've been my first clue. I find it unsettling when I don't have a frame of reference for the TIME involved in a story. At first I thought Leah and Gideon were living in the early 'teens of the last century. Then it would appear that no wait --- it must be the 30's, whoops, now it's the 50's, now back to the 20's and so on. That was extremely frustrating for me, and when I finally finished the book I almost had to conclude that the entire story took place in Bromwell Bellefleur's parallel universe.

All this left me with a real uneasy sense of a colossal "HUH???" Although the prose was beautiful and the imagery was striking, I felt a bit of a sense of let-down when I couldn't figure out the basic theory of time in this novel.

So -- what did I miss?