Customer Reviews

What I Lived For.

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read "What I Lived For" in Polish several years ago when it was freshly translated and published in a deluxe hardcover series in Poland. My impressions faded a bit in their freshness since that time, but I still remember what tickled me while reading this novel. Never having been to America beforehand, I tried to form the image of this country based on literature, motion pictures and third-hand information coming from people of my cultural heritage who have been there already. This novel by Joyce Carol Oates helped me form the initial expectations, adding just another brick in the wall of expectations, to borrow a phrase from Roger Waters. Much like the Floydian Wall, that house of cards fell down and disintegrated almost from the very first day of my visit to America, but after several years spent here, I think that if nothing else, Oates's novel is about the only remaining bastion of my old impressions. I still perceive the fictional world of Oates as representative for America, or to be precise, a slice from the overall cake of a picture. Her fiction, though never being pompous or in-your-face-yankee-style patriotic quasi-fiction of the engaged kind, it serves quite well as a door to America, to the anxieties specific to the upstart middle class, an endemic layer of the American society half of the country aspiring to, the newcomer generation in particular, the other half having just outgrown it and moved forward. There is a multitude of possible answers to a trite question what makes America so special, what makes it a magnet attracting people from all over the world. "What I Lived For" is one of these answers, and a compelling one at that. The book starts off with a brutal scene several decades ago, and we are introduced to the life of one "Corky" Corcoran, a son of the relatively poor Irish neighborhoods, whose life will soon turn about to be one long quest in the search for an escape valve from the maze of the labyrinth of his complexes, the inferiority complex with financial grounds being one of the most prominent ones. Corky moves upward, and as soon as he reaches one rung higher in the social ladder, he turns and faces his thus-far perfectly acceptable peers in condescending manner. As soon as he becomes a locally recognized man of moderate power, he decided to reach down to the bottom, and familiarize with the masses. There are few scenes in literature that depict the snobbish artificiality and resulting embarrassment better than many scenes in the second half of "What I Lived For". Oates looks very critically at the typical new-American upstarts for whom grace and tact are lost art. America attracts people of specific personality; by the laws of nature it is a self-selection process. The worst kind, and the most brilliant kind are attracted to come to that "golden land of opportunity". And then the second and third generations are not free from their inferiority complex, as this novel illustrates. While it's only one aspect of the American phenomenon, it is not a negligible one, and that is one of the reasons why this particular book is translated and popular in Europe. While the details fade away in time, the overall impression is long-lasting, and should you happen to be more familiar with the specifics this novel is rich with, the more sense it makes. Joyce Carol Oates has written a thought-provoking book that bitterly asks questions few people seem willing to answer.

Oates fans will see familiar territory here: Alcoholism, emotional detachment, failed relationships, the dull thud of time as it drags us through a suburban existence. This is Oates' obsession, recycled for the ten-thousandth time.
What's new to this novel is Oates' ability to cause the reader to abandon moral outrage and identify completely with the main character, Corky Corcoran. He's shady and often crosses over into lewdness that embarrasses the reader. But - why is this? - you start to like him. You give in, not because he deserves your love, but because you want to give it to him. Only Oates could pull it off.
I'm an avid reader of the novelist's work, and this book is by far the best. Months after reading that final line of that exhausting novel, I still miss Corky Corcoran in my life.

"Corky" Corcoran is not the best of men--a womanizer, not the most honest of politicians or businessmen, and a somewhat failing father and nephew--but as Oates develops Corky you begin to actually like him. You definitely will never love his character but you breathe with him, live with him, and feel his pain and his ecstacy over a non-stop Memorial Day weekend. Corky is always moving and sweet-talking in his expensive Caddy, in his expensive clothing, with a glass of Red Label whiskey in his hand. To tell of Corky's plight that drives him all over town during this Memorial Day weekend would be to ruin the reader's enjoyment of the book. Be warned though that Oates' prose is raw and uninhibited and speaks through Corky's male perspective. Her prose can be disconcerting at times with graphic expletives galore but get past that and you will find an excellent and engrossing novel that delves into Corky's psyche

This is a very powerful book. I read the first chapter three times before I continued, because I was amazed at what I was reading. The writing is so strong, the character so well written, I feel like I know him and like him for all his flaws. I loved this book, because of it I have gone on to read 10 more JCO novels and this one is still one of my favorites.

I'm a big fan of Joyce Carol Oates, but this book was much better than I thought it would be, and has remained in my thoughts though I read it more than a year ago. Corky Corcoran is a fascinating, tragic character and his story is alternately repulsive and compelling. I loved this book.

This is an excellent novel. Joyce Carol Oates takes everyday people and shows them in their glory and their faults, which makes you feel like you know them. WHAT I LIVED FOR covers a period in the life of Corky Corcoran, local bigwig, city councilman, and man-about-town. The book has a wonderfully vivid prologue which sets the mood for Corky's adult life. Fitted into the story, but not as a main pont, is the questionable death of a former, quasi-girlfriend and the ensuing police investigation. Corky deals with his married lover, his mentally-imbalanced stepdaughter, and his dearest childhood friend, all in an affable manner. The ending is emotional, but the epilogue is excellent, setting everything straight. Ms. Oates is talented, very versatile and a joy to read.

Joyce Carol Oates is a terrific writer, and some of the passages in this book are incredibly powerful. However, whenever the topic turns to sex and romance, her prose becomes embarrassingly commercial, excessive, predictable, and gushy, kind of like Danielle Steele on speed. The character of Corky Corcoran is realistic in some ways, but when she ultimately presents him as some kind of macho superstud hero, the book takes an irrevocable turn toward being a disappointment.

This huge, engrossing, compelling and nearly perfect novel was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and, if it had won, the prize would have been well deserved. This is one of Oates's best novels, ranking up there with the Gravedigger's Daughter. Different territory for Oates. This novel gets inside the head of Corky Corcoran for 600 pages and never lets the reader escape. Small time graft, small time ambitions, passions, and swimming against the current of life in an amazingly upbeat tale for Oates, who usually drags us into the horrific evil of life's determined psychopaths and their victims. Watch Corky struggle against daunting cultural forces in a comedic and serious look at anytown America.

Don't miss this incredibly rich novel if you are a Joyce Carol Oates fan. I am.

"What I Lived For" is one of my favorite books by ANY author. It's difficult to talk about this book without ruining it for a new reader. It's amazing how JCO has written this without any sentimentality or apologies. This is her most under-rated book for some reason. This is a great book and one you will never forget. It stays in your head and that's the sign, to me, that a book was well worth reading.

I don't know many writers who could sit down at their desk and say, "I think I can do this." What Joyce Carol Oates set out to achieve in this massive book was the telling in the course of about 800 pages of an almost minute-by-minute account of three eventful days in one man's life.

Corky Corcoran, the main character here, is a loud, gutsy, bright but not suave Irishman who has lived his whole life in one tough blue collar city in upstate New York. Corky is a self-made millionaire (but just barely!) and a minor elected member of city government, friend to the monied and political elite, yet somehow socially beneath all of them, unknown to him but clear to us a sort of friendly, slobbery dog they allow into their presence because he's good for a laugh. Corky is also a flashy, handsome, charming man who has always had success with women, but he limits himself with his alcoholism, his course manners and by the curse of his life, which is his inability to move beyond the brutal Christmastime mob hit that left his popular businessman father shot to death on the family doorstep when Corky was a child, and the crime's sole witness.

Over the course of the three days in the early 1990's in which we follow Corky second by second through all (and I mean ALL) aspects of his life, we watch while he becomes obsessed with the apparent suicide of a local girl who had shady ties to both a radical political group as well as certain establishment big-wigs, tries to contain his mentally unstable, violent, leftist stepdaughter in her own obsession with the girl's death, ends his relationship with his singularly faithful/unfaithful mistress, has perverse fantasies about virtually every attractive female within range, wheels and deals with his defensively Jewish accountant to hold his semi-crumbling fortune together, and we slide through the inner workings of his mind, sometimes his subconscious mind, via the non-stop inner dialogue of the private Corky being who he is.

By the end of this hard-edged novel, we know Corky inside and out, as Oates intended. We know what motivates him, what he fears, what he would do in a given situation, and we can guess how the remainder of his life will probably play out. We have met by novel's end, Corky the brave hero, Corky the self-dooming victim, Corky the shameless hustler, and Corky the vulnerable dead man's son, who craves the acceptance his flamboyant father never lived to get.

Those who maintain the head of steam needed to reach the last page of this slow-moving but richly described work will have made it through literary boot camp and will be the better for it. There are very few books out there quite like it.