Man Crazy [Hardcover]

Joyce Carol Oates (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1997

Having gone into hiding with her mother when she was only eight, Ingrid becomes a vulnerable teen, desperate for a father and ripe for the abuses of a cult leader, until she escapes and struggles to heal and grow into a healthy and happy young woman. 40,000 first printing. Tour."

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Ingrid Boone and her too-young momma, Chloe, live a hard-bitten life on New York's Chautauqua River as they flee Luke, a Vietnam vet who fathered Ingrid. The mostly no-account men who people Chloe's boozy existence pale beside crazed Luke, who keeps tracking down his family. Little wonder that Ingrid grows into a self-destructive adolescent, sinking into a morass of drugs and self-mutilation, believing that the path to love is lots of pain. Under the thrall of the cult leader of a motorcycle gang, Ingrid suffers a downward spiral that is nearly complete when she is gang-raped, forced to witness a decapitation, then imprisoned in a filthy basement with nothing to eat but garbage and animal waste. At the end, Oates (We Were the Mulvaneys, LJ 11/15/96) asks readers to believe that two years of hospitalization and intensive therapy bring Ingrid miraculous redemption and true love in the arms of her much older former psychiatrist. An ugly tale told, without question, by a master of evocative misery, but to what purpose? For Oates fans only.?Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., Mich.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The phenomenally prolific Oates' latest novel (her twenty-seventh!) is not her most successful one in recent years, but it definitely has its strengths. In a series of chapters, each resembling a short story in its completeness (indeed, a half-dozen of the chapter-stories have been published previously), the early life of Ingrid Boone is played out in all its turbulence. From age 5 to 21, Ingrid goes through several lifetimes' worth of hard knocks. Ingrid is forced to give up any kind of domestic tranquility when her mother (with Ingrid in tow) leaves house and husband behind and searches on her own for ways to keep body and soul together. Naturally, Ingrid, searching for a replacement for a father's love, grows up alienated from her mother and from life itself ("It wasn't my life but just a life that seemed to be happening"), starts using drugs, and falls under the sway of a violent scumbag of a biker who heads a weird cult. In a wrenching climax, Ingrid undergoes rescue and reconciliation and comes to enjoy the undiluted pleasure of simply being alive. The psychology seems a little too pat here, but Oates still manages to rouse the reader's concern for Ingrid and her fate. Oates' fans will be placing circulation-desk requests, so be prepared. Brad Hooper

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult; 1ST edition (September 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525942327
• ISBN-13: 978-0525942320
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,830,337 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

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Well-Boiled Pot from Joyce Carol Oates, September 7, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (New Hampshire) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Man Crazy (Hardcover)

Brutal murders, drug abuse, juvenile delinquency, satan worshippers -- yes, it's a new Joyce Carol Oates novel. Fresh from editing a collection of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction, Oates has been inspired to unleash upon the world a compelling series of nightmare incidents in the life of her protagonist, Ingrid Boone.Subtle it's not. The second half of the novel is full of campy scenes of grand guignol grossness that are so over-the-top they don't even try to suspend your disbelief. The prose is often fevered and ungrammatic, rattling on unpunctuated and uncontrolled like an uninspired parody of Faulkner. Most of the characters are caricatures at best, and their reductively Freudian motivations are appallingly simplistic.

Amazingly, though, much of the novel is successful. Many of the scenes in the first 150 pages are viscerally effective, the sort of images you remember for days after a really interesting nightmare. Also, the character of Ingrid is complex enough to sustain the reader's interest through much of the book, and the ending is surprisingly moving.

Some critics have been unnecessarily harsh on "Man Crazy", holding it to standards toward which it doesn't aspire. It's a potboiler, and a good one. Most of the themes were handled better in Oates's earlier novel "Foxfire", but "Man Crazy" is more fun. When Oates wants to, she can write serious and important novels like "We Were the Mulvaneys", but that's not the sort of thing she's writing here. This is Oates playing in Stephen King territory -- it's kind of like Pavarotti singing folk songs, but you'd probably never listen to folk songs (or Pavarotti) the same way again.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Truly Heartbreaking Read, March 26, 2005

By 

Cassie W. (Ohio) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Man Crazy: A Novel (Paperback)

Man Crazy, by Joyce Carol Oates, chronicles the childhood and adolescence of Ingrid Boone, who, with her beautiful young mother Chloe, is forced to flee her normal life multiple times on account of a violent, nearly-absent but ever-present father. Set in Northern New York, in a string of towns bordering the Chautauqua River and Mountains, Man Crazy is written in Ingrid's voice--often in streams of consciousness and reflections on memories--and follows her through various events in her young life: the vision of ghosts under a farmhouse porch; secret visits with her father; the plagiarism of a poem, recited at an assembly; the dozens of encounters with faceless men in the backs of cars; the acid trips; the initiation into a satanic cult led by enigmatic Enoch Skaggs. Her uncertain relationship with her mother is what caused her life to take the direction it did, while at the same time it is her mother who pulls her out of her degradation; thus, the novel has a redemptive quality. Ingrid's life is a troubled one as she looks back on it, telling her story to a counselor. By the end of the novel, Ingrid has reformed, has turned her life around; she is the age of 21, but seems a hundred years old.

The voice Oates gives to Ingrid is a distinctive one; as I mentioned, the story is told in fragments of memory and streams of consciousness, often written in fragments, run-on sentences, and paragraphs that continue for pages. Once I got used to this somewhat confusing manner of writing, I really enjoyed the way Oates uses language for the purpose of character development. Ingrid's voice is honest, simple, and forthright, while at the same time her meanings are multi-layered; in many cases, she is saying more than she thinks she is. Oates also uses her gift for language to paint disturbing, haunting pictures with her words: a teetering bridge, drug and sexual abuse, a decapitation, a dank basement where people are trapped, forced to eat garbage to stay alive. These images are powerful and hard to read about--but at the same time, I found myself unable to stop reading. This novel is beautiful in its simplicity yet startling in its dimensions.

I was unsatisfied with the ending of the novel, however. It seemed as though Oates was eager to give Ingrid a happy ending, but I was left wondering: How can Ingrid possibly love anyone else, when she's just learning to love herself? Nevertheless, I couldn't put this book down; it is a powerful, realistic portrayal of a girl who is given a new beginning after being in the lowest possible state, and it both broke my heart and made it soar.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Really twisted family values, April 19, 2000

By 

Doug Vaughn - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Man Crazy (Hardcover)

This story of a young girl's coming of age is both touching and horrifying. Ingrid is born to an attractive young couple whose world falls apart when the husband, an ex Vietnam War pilot, gets involved in a drug smuggling homicide and has to go into hiding. His absense, and the shabby conditions of her life with her mother, form the basis of a lifelong obsession with being needed by men. Ingrid's descent from precocious child to promiscous teenager to the ultimate degradation of being "dog-girl" to a satanic motorcylce cult, is told unflintchingly. Believable at every step, it is a painful and disturbing tale.

Oates style is like nothing I can remember recently. I don't know if this is typical of her books (this is the only one I have read) but she takes many liberties with syntax and punctuation, yet there is no sense of deliberately trying to be literary or arty and everything about the "voice" she chooses seems appropriate.

It would not be correct to say that I "enjoyed" this book, but I did find it moving, fascinating, and ultimately satisfying. I will be in search of other fiction by Joyce Carol Oates - after reading some lighter stuff first, just to get Satan's Children out of my mind.