Mudwoman: A Novel [Hardcover]

Joyce Carol Oates (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 20, 2012

“Oates is just a fearless writer…with her brave heart and her impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers.”
—Los Angeles Times
 
“[An] extraordinarily intense, racking, and resonant novel.”
—Booklist (starred review)

One of the most acclaimed writers in the world today, the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates follows up her searing, New York Times bestselling memoir, A Widow’s Story, with an extraordinary new work of fiction. Mudwoman is a riveting psychological thriller, taut with dark suspense, that explores the high price of repression in the life of a respected university president teetering on the precipice of a nervous breakdown. Like Daphne DuMaurier’s gothic masterwork, Rebecca, and the classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, Oates’s Mudwoman is a chilling page-turner that hinges on the power of the imagination and the blurry lines between the real and the invented—and it stands tall among the author’s most powerful and beloved works, including The Falls, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, and We Were the Mulvaneys.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“[A] powerful novel…[Oates] deftly interweaves M.R.’s present, memories of her troubled childhood, and her feverish hallucinations…This hypnotic novel suggests that forgetting the past may be the heavy cost that success demands.” (The New Yorker)

“Uniquely personal… an intriguing departure from token Oates tales.” (Huffington Post)

“Madness and malevolence squirm on almost every page in Joyce Carol Oates’ 38th novel… Oates’ dark brilliance is ever evident in her main characters, complex souls with mysterious corners in their psyches…” (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

“This chilling novel opens with a child left to die in a silty riverbed, a memory that no amount of later life success can erase.” (O, the Oprah Magazine)

“…The Oates style, with its fractious barrage of dashes, suggests what [Emily] Dickenson might have produced if she had written doorstop novels instead of short poems…[Oates] is especially perceptive in showing the political tightrope that M.R. has to walk in her powerful but fragile position at the university…” (Wall Street Journal)

“[A] disturbing, psychological thriller.” (New York Post)

“Extraordinarily intense, racking, and resonant... Masterfully enmeshing nightmare with reality, Oates has created a resolute, incisive, and galvanizing drama about our deep connection to place, the persistence of the past, and the battles of a resilient soul under siege… A major, controversy-ready novel from high-profile, protean Oates.” (Booklist (starred review))

“Oates [displays] the insights into human bonds that make her brilliant....Oates makes [her character’s] torment come alive. We grasp her compulsion to return to the mud of the past in order find her true self.” (USA Today)

“[A] disturbing exploration of selfhood…As always, Joyce Carol Oates masterfully evokes a sense of menace, if not malevolence, while drawing her readers deep into the psychology of her characters… a dark, intelligent and deeply compelling novel... which will hold you in its thrall until the end.” (Washington Independent Review of Books)

“There’s a freshness to this novel, a sense of some new, more personal beginning. It’s bold... to paint achievement... as just the flip side of victimization--and it’s perhaps even bolder to make such visceral drama from the story of a workaholic who finally confronts life unhooked from a keyboard.” (New York Times Book Review)

“Oates is an extremely visceral writer…Mudwoman is a genuinely unsettling book in which Oates pays her readers the compliment of never letting them settle or even being entirely sure about what they have just read.” (Financial Times)

“Mudwoman is very good at the performance of the public life of the woman president…The unraveling of this performance is grippingly horrible.” (New York Review of Books)

“Joyce Carol Oates’ latest novel is about many things, but first and foremost it is about the complications of being a high-achieving woman in the 21st century…Oates tells [her protagonist’s story] with a detail and relish that’s both heartbreaking and fascinating.” (Ms. magazine)

From the Back Cover

A riveting novel that explores the high price of success in the life of one woman—the first female president of a lauded ivy league institution—and her hold upon her self-identity in the face of personal and professional demons, from Joyce Carol Oates, author of the New York Times bestseller A Widow’s Story

Mudgirl is a child abandoned by her mother in the silty flats of the Black Snake River. Cast aside, Mudgirl survives by an accident of fate—or destiny. After her rescue, the well-meaning couple who adopt Mudgirl quarantine her poisonous history behind the barrier of their middle-class values, seemingly sealing it off forever. But the bulwark of the present proves surprisingly vulnerable to the agents of the past.

Meredith “M.R.” Neukirchen is the first woman president of an Ivy League university. Her commitment to her career and moral fervor for her role are all-consuming. Involved with a secret lover whose feelings for her are teasingly undefined, and concerned with the intensifying crisis of the American political climate as the United States edges toward war with Iraq, M.R. is confronted with challenges to her leadership that test her in ways she could not have anticipated. The fierce idealism and intelligence that delivered her from a more conventional life in her upstate New York hometown now threaten to undo her.

A reckless trip upstate thrusts M.R. Neukirchen into an unexpected psychic collision with Mudgirl and the life M.R. believes she has left behind. A powerful exploration of the enduring claims of the past, Mudwoman is at once a psychic ghost story and an intimate portrait of a woman cracking the glass ceiling at enormous personal cost, which explores the tension between childhood and adulthood, the real and the imagined, and the “public” and “private” in the life of a highly complex contemporary woman.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; First Edition edition (March 20, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780062095626
• ISBN-13: 978-0062095626
• ASIN: 0062095625
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #323,303 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.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#70 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

#94 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#70 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

#94 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 46 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Lack of Resolution to Various Themes March 27, 2012

By D_shrink VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Even though a real fan of this author and having written flattering reviews of her work in the past, this work leaves me in some wonderment [in keeping with the Quaker Theme used in parts of this work]. I also felt it was overly long and repetitive in numerous places, but my biggest concern was the lack of resolution of any type of meaningful ending. It is as though it were written during a bout of schizophrenia, where many things make sense to the originator of the thoughts but not to anyone else.

The heroine survivor-woman of our story is known during her adult years as M.R. [Meredith Ruth] Neukirchen of Carthage, NY in the Adirondack Mountains. She is adopted by a very loving Quaker couple, Agatha and Konrad Neukirchen and given the birthday of 9-21-61, which is also important to the story. She was abandoned by her birth mother Marit Kraeck a very psychotic woman of extremely humble background. Marit tries to kill the child by throwing her in a mudflat, where she is found by a mentally challenged man lead there by a big black bird known as THE KING OF THE CROWS for the rest of the story. As a child she was called either Jedina or Jewell [the discovery of how that is reconciled is part of the story so I won't spoil it]. She gets the not-so-kind nickname Mudwoman, as an adult, and was called Mudgirl, while a child, due to the method of her abandonment.

Another facet of this story is that you are not always sure when an event important to the story really happened or was merely a psychotic episode imagined by our heroine, which included but are not limited to several amorous encounters.

I normally love reading the frenetic, emphatic, and jittery writing style of this author, but found the lack of resolution to many parts of the story somewhat off putting leaving one dyspeptic in the end. About three quarters of the way through the book, the discussion got off course veering towards the morality and political correctness of conservatives versus liberals. It is like a teacher reviewing the work of an A student who occasionally turns in work of a somewhat lesser quality. This would equate to one of those times. I am sure her next work will be back to snuff.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Dark Even by JCO Standards April 26, 2012

By Sam Sattler TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Mudwoman is dark even by Joyce Carol Oates standards. Oates is well known for novels featuring female leads that do not sense the physical jeopardy they are in before it is almost too late to escape it. Suddenly, these women - as intelligent and accomplished as they may be - recognize that they have wandered into a situation that could cost them their lives. The threat usually comes from an evil or deranged man but, in the case of Mudwoman, all the damage is done by a little girl's own mother.

When she is three, Jedina Kraek's mother decides to murder her and her five-year-old sister. Jedina is shaved bald as part of her mother's religious delusions and tossed into a mud flat near the Black Snake River where her mother assumes that she will drown in the muck. Against all odds, the little girl is found by a mentally handicapped local trapper and taken into a foster family for several years. When the Neukirchens, a childless Quaker couple, adopt her, Jedina (who had mistakenly claimed her older sister's name, Jewel) becomes Meredith Ruth Neukirchen.

"Merry" does her best to live up to the Quaker standards of her parents, and becomes the model student, an overachiever who compensates for her insecurities by excelling at academics. Secretly, Meredith applies for, and wins, the scholarship to Cornell that she believes will be her ticket to a new life far from stifling Carthage, New York.

Mudwoman is told in chapters that alternate between Meredith's girlhood and her present life as the first female president of a prestigious Ivy League university. Now 41, and calling herself M.R. Neukirchen, Meredith lives alone in a spooky, "historic" house on campus allocated to the president and spends all of her waking hours on university business - much of it involving fundraisers at which she must impress potential donors with her administrative competence. Oates, herself a Princeton teacher since 1978, is very familiar with this world and she exposes its inner workings here in detail.

Because so much of what takes place in the present happens entirely inside M.R.'s head, the book becomes a contrast between a realistic presentation of her childhood and the more surrealistic presentation of her present day circumstances. What happens when M.R.'s childhood demons intrude upon her present life is often painful to watch. When cracks begin to appear in her public persona, expect to be horrified by M.R.'s mental collapse as the university board of directors tries to contain the damage and deal with the problems she creates for the school.

Mudwoman is frustrating at times because Oates, who is a master of this writing style, wants her readers to be (at least temporarily) as confused as M.R. herself about what is real and what happens only in her dreams. The good news is that patient readers will find that most, but not quite all, of the answers are revealed by the end of the book. Even better news is that they will have spent so much time inside M.R.'s head that they will likely know and understand her as well as they do any fictional character they have ever encountered.

Although it can be a difficult read at times, I highly recommend Mudwoman.

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Mudwoman by Carol Joyce Oates April 5, 2012

By P. L. Briggs

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I am a great fan of Joyce Carol Oates and no wonder. I think she has won more writing awards than I have fingers and toes. Mudwoman was first Mudchild, so called because her insane mother put her in a quicksand-like mudflat to die. A sister was already unaccounted for. Mudchild was rescued and put first with a foster family and then adopted by a loving Quaker family. When Mudchild was rescued she gave the name of her sister and was called by that until she herself changed her name later in life. She did not feel totally comfortable with them but later in life had a loving relationship with her stepfather.

A mystery to me was what had happened to the sister. This was finally mentioned. She was dead, of course. I found what had happened; but I think I missed something or else this, too, was shrouded in mystery.

She achieved. Well educated, she became president of a university and called herself M. R., first name Meredith. She was haunted by dreams and nightmares of the past and it was at first impossible for the reader to distinguish between fact and the imagined. Eventually, these events would become clear. I enjoyed the mysticism and symbolism here. Meredith herself eventually became unnerved by - was it memories or imaginary happenings?

On the verge of breakdown, she left the university and returned to the home of her adopted father, the mother having died. He was very intuitive. Eventually he told her where her birth mother was. I will not spoil the meeting between Meredith and her mother by describing it.

Another reviewer said this book did not have a definitive ending, but I felt it did. I felt it had the only ending it could have.

Once again Joyce Carol Oates gave me a book I could savor, mull over and analyze the meanings of all the events and thoughts of the central character.