The Rise of Life on Earth [Paperback]

Joyce Carol Oates (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 1992

"Like most important writers—Joyce, Proust, Mann—she has an absolute identification with her material: the spirit of a society at a crucial point in its history."—Walter Clemens, Newsweek

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the most notable books of 1991, Joyce Carol Oates's The Rise of Life on Earth is a memorable portrait of one of the "insulted and injured" of American society. Set in the underside of working-class Detroit of the '60s and '70s, this short, lyric novel sketches Kathleen Hennessy's violent childhood—shattered by a broken home, child-beating, and murder—and follows her into her early adult years as a hospital health-care worker. Overworked, underpaid, and quietly overzealous, Kathleen falls in love with a young doctor, whose exploitation of her sets the course of the remainder of her life, in which her passivity masks a deep fury and secret resolve to take revenge.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

National Book Award winner Oates's ( Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart ) tightly-focused novella features a disturbed woman who enjoys the ambience of hospitals.

Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most important and well known writers—and one of America’s foremost writers of the short story form. She is also a regular contributor of reviews and criticism for the New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She also reads and lectures widely throughout the US, at universities and bookstores.

Product Details

• Paperback: 142 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (September 17, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811212130
• ISBN-13: 978-0811212137
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,128,483 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

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dark, unsettling, though provoking, June 2, 2002

By 

Curtis Lane (Orlando, FL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rise of Life on Earth (Paperback)

This book, in the Gothic-Oatsian tradition, follows an trod-upon product of our society--yes, a female. Beaten nearly to death by her alcoholic father--in the same beating, her sister was killed--our "protagonist" decides she wants to be a nurse during her two week hospital recovery. She half-meets this dream by becoming a nurses aide, but she never makes a full emotional recovery. Another key event keeps her anger just beneath the surface to errupt when it seems safe for her to do so. This books twists through some small, dark avenues and ends on a scene that is unforgettable, grotesque, and devastating.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very disturbing, important short novel, June 21, 2007

By 

Aleksandra Nita-Lazar (MD, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Rise of Life on Earth (Paperback)

Kathleen Hennessy, the main character in "The Rise of Life on Earth" by Joyce Carol Oates is a person like many we pass by everyday, barely registering them in our consciousness, not noticing and not paying attention, while we perhaps should.





This short novel starts when eleven year old Kathleen is in the hospital after severe beating she received from her father when her mother ran away from the abusive household. Kathleen's younger sister has fallen into a coma and died following the beating. Kathleen, docile, quiet, unattractive and slow, overweight girl, is nevertheless because of her apathy, her calm and passive agreement to everything going on around her, a favorite of the hospital nurses, who pamper her with leftover gifts. There is, however, something disturbing about this girl, and what it is we learn soon enough to expect a climactic event. How much was she damaged by the abuse she witnessed and how much of her behavior is just her natural way - are the two even possible to distinguish from one another?





Later on, Kathleen passes through a succession of better or worse foster homes, all the time apparently seeing the outside world as through the window in the rain. At school, she continues to be slow and with much pain barely learn enough to sustain herself on the surface. In one of the foster homes, a mysterious fire kills most of the inhabitants, but Kathleen escapes and goes on with her seemingly unremarkable life. She becomes a nurse aid, manages to be organized and perform well according to instructions , which makes her happy enough, The problem is, Kathleen longs for love and family - she does not want to be perceived as worse than her colleagues and falls into the trap of being available to basically any man who wants her... The one she really falls for is a resident from her hospital, Orson, who is a drug addict and fails in his career, but is backed up by his well-off, respectable family. Orson is, naturally, not serious about Kathleen, and only wants to (even against his will, just following the animal in himself) use her for his physical needs. The obvious consequence, pregnancy, has an effect opposite to Kathleen's dreams of marriage, but facing the reality she decides to deal with it alone, as she dealt with everything in her life before.





"The Rise of Life on Earth" is written in a dry, reporting the facts, unemotional way, which, as is often the case, stresses the tragism of Kathleen's life and the events described. I read it in a little more than one hour, without being able to put the book down, angry and sad. How can the Kathleens of this world change anything despite the rage boiling inside them? The obvious conclusion from this novel is that there is no hope for people born and raised in certain circumstances even in so-called democratic, developed societies. They stay where they are, unhappy as they are, and life goes on with misery and without light, which is the fault of the society as well as of what these people are - it is a vicious circle which cannot be broken... The prose is sometimes written as the stream of consciousness, without division into short sentences, which even more stresses the chaos in Kathleen's head.





Although I don't think that it is the best novel written by Oates, who is a very prolific author and so not all of her novels can have the same level, and here she needed to be very concise to get the message through in a short literary form, "The Rise of Life on Earth" is a disturbing and nightmarish book which stays with the reader forever, leaving them with the feeling of helplessness, because of the weight if the questions tackled.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Women on the Edge: From Fetching to Retching, April 3, 2003

By 

James Paris "Tarnmoor" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rise of Life on Earth (Paperback)

The more I read of Joyce Carol Oates, the more I get drawn in by her tales of women on the edge.

We have all seen women like Kathleen Hennessy. When you look at them with the eyes half-closed, they are almost fetching if you are feeling somewhat peckish; but alpha males just continue scanning for more promising material. (If the preceding sentence strikes you as callous, you may be wound up too tight to read this book.)

That Oates can take seemingly unpromising material like Kathleen Hennessy and, while being true to her subject, manages to show that, for many, life on earth hasn't risen far enough. The daughter of an abusive father and a runaway mother, Kathleen finds herself in a series of foster homes in the Detroit area, growing up hoping to become a nurse but ending up as a nurse's aide. She manages to attract a young physician named Orson Abbott, but the relationship progresses no further than her pregnancy.

Without giving away the ending, I can only say that Kathleen's solution to her problem is simple, methodical, and great material for a supermarket tabloid spread. In fact, certain events occur almost in passing that would make for a great cover story in the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

Oates is second only to Anton Chekhov in her ability to take a seemingly uncomplicated person and show us depths we had never before imagined. Why, I wonder, is she not given the honor she deserves? I think many readers take her for granted because she is so prolific and writes mostly about women. Duh, so did Jane Austen!