I'll Take You There: A Novel (Paperback)

~ (Author) "In those days in the early Sixties we were not women yet but girls..." (more)
Key Phrases: silk vest, Vernor Matheius, Dean of Women, Hildie Pomeroy (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In her bewitching 30th novel, I'll Take You There, Joyce Carol Oates returns again to neurotic female post-adolescence. The unnamed narrator attends an upstate New York university in the early 1960s. In those times of tightly prescribed femininity, she joins a sorority in a bald attempt to become part of the sisterhood of normalcy. It doesn't work. She reads philosophy, she works for a living, she's asexual, she's an orphan, she's a Jew: "I was a freak in the midst of their stunning, stampeding, blazing female normality." Booted from the sorority, she falls hard for a thirtyish black philosophy student who seems to her to live on a higher plane than the rest of humanity. In the final section, she is called west to the deathbed of someone she thought was lost to her forever. Oates brings together some of her strongest trademark qualities: She writes her character's life as though it were a fairy tale. She sells her material, bringing dramatic tension to the very first page: "They would claim I destroyed Mrs. Thayer.... Yet others would claim that Mrs. Thayer destroyed me." And she writes with tender care about the intellectual life of her young protagonist. Some find Oates's obsession with nascent womanhood claustrophobic, but in this heroine she finds a vein of integrity and intellectual probity peculiar to those who are not quite adult. Most writers treat college life as comedy or romance. Oates, on the other hand, seriously explores an age when we are most terribly ourselves. She seems to find something deeply human and pleasingly dramatic in this time wedged between childhood and adulthood. --Claire Dederer --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Most of us transcend the solipsism of loneliness by involvement in family, school or work. "Anellia," the narrator of Oates's 30th novel (who never reveals her real name), is denied the comfort of a family, finds education to be a frustrating journey through various hostile worlds and finally becomes that most solitary of creatures, a writer. The time is the early '60s. Anellia is the last child of Ida and Eric. After Ida's death (for which Anellia is blamed by her three brothers), Eric leaves his daughter to be raised by his cold German Lutheran parents in the upstate New York town of Strykersville. Anellia wins a scholarship to Syracuse University around 1960. She becomes for a period a Kappa Gamma Pi. The conventionally girlish Kappas are a decidedly different breed from Anellia: she is intellectual, shy, careless of her looks and hygiene, poor. Eventually the Kappas and Anellia come to a violent parting of the ways. Next, Anellia has a depressingly anhedonic affair with a black philosophy graduate student, Vernor Matheius. Vernor is trying to hold himself aloof from the civil rights struggle making the evening news, yet necessarily becomes drawn in. In the final section, Anellia, living in Vermont and working on her first book, goes to Utah to be with her father on his deathbed. Oates's fans will be pleased by the usual care with which she goes about constructing the psychology of Anellia and Vernor, but may find Anellia too narrow and stifling a spirit, limiting the larger gestures and bravura flashes of gothicism at which Oates excels.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (September 16, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060501189
• ISBN-13: 978-0060501181
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #105,659 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Arriving Where She Needs To Be, October 1, 2002

By	Eric Anderson (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: I'll Take You There: A Novel (Hardcover)

I'll Take You There is a story divided into three sections concerning crucial stages of a girl's development and narrated in the first person by the girl, Anellia, herself. This is the same structure Joyce Carol Oates uses in her 1986 novel Marya: A Life though the stories of the two novels differ in some crucial elements. The first section, The Penitent, is primarily concerned with Anellia's torturous time spent in a sorority called Kappa Gamma Pi and her relationship with the foreboding and ultimately tragic English headmistress Mrs. Agnes Thayer. Her entrance into the sorority sparked by a timid desire to gain acceptance from her peers, gradually reveals the shallow nature of the sisters and the vacuous symbols of their elite collective. The second section, The Negro Lover, explores Anellia's complex relationship with brilliant and troubled Vernor Matheius. Her obsession with the philosophy student blooms into a tumultuous relationship based on passion that is stirred by feelings of alienation. Each of them are fiercely intelligent and trapped by a societal definition based on the exterior that they cannot escape. But unlike Vernor, Anellia embraces this identity distinction, her Jewish heritage, in order to exile herself from the repugnant normality she has discovered. The third and slightest section, The Way Out, finds Anellia extracted from the developmental struggle of university and unexpectedly driven to a reunion with her estranged father. As he is slowly dying, she develops a relationship with his caregiver and fiancee Hildie. The feelings of opportunities lost and emotions wasted are gradually excavated over their time together as they come to terms with losing a man who will always remain an aloof mystery.

This novel is brewing with complex ideas all delicately arranged around an intricate plot. The sections of the novel could stand quite independently from each other. But together they draw an intriguing picture of Anellia's development and her discovery of the woman she wants to become. The frame she has set around her life is designed to mollify her qualms with existence but it is also a trap that limits the freedom of her individuality. The language she composes to liberate herself is also an unbearable burden. This is revealed in the telling line: "In fear I seemed to be plucking at, with childish fingers, a consolation of philosophy." Anellia's relationship with Vernor is akin to an artist gazing upon her muse, drawing inspiration and guidance to create an artwork, an identity for herself. Unhesitating in her confrontation of the troubles of racial relations as Oates always is, the denial of the language which defines Vernor's color provokes the collapse of any true connection between them. This, paired with Vernor's own inability to divert from the path he has limited himself to, makes their coupling wildly antagonistic and dangerous.

It is significant that Oates has dedicated this novel to Gloria Vanderbilt, the visual artist, on who's work Oates has written: "It may be that Dream Boxes represent an elliptical, subversive reclaiming of identity by one who has, unlike most of us, been over-defined - `over-determined' in psychoanalytical terms-by the exterior world." Anellia is also unique and this confession to an unknown companion is her psychological triptych. Engagingly emotional and philosophical, I'll Take You There is a deep study of a difficult climb to adulthood. Its artful composition produces a compelling novel. It is a skillful accomplishment that can be enjoyed by both the passionate thinking and the romantic reader.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oates is Fabulous, Again, January 9, 2003

By	Elizabeth Hendry (New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: I'll Take You There: A Novel (Hardcover)

I have to start off this review by admitting that I love Joyce Carol Oates. There is something wonderful, entrancing about the rhythm of her prose that is again present in I'll Take You There. Her writing is always so wonderfully evocative and almost hypnotic. Her characters, in particular the nameless narrator if I'll Take You There, are all trapped in something they cannot see, but which Oates lets us see all too well. In I'll Take You There, the narrator, a young college woman in the early 60s is desperately trying to fit it and although at times she succeeds, that success is only external. Internally, for some reason she perceives herself as a loser, a misfit. She tries first to fit in with a sorority and when that doesn't work out, she undertakes a relationship with a African American graduate student about ten years her senior. Neither of these "relationships" are right for the narrator for reasons she sees, but for some reason ignores. She is a complex and at times frustrating protagonist, yet Oates keeps you reading. I enjoyed this book very much, but I will say that if you are not an Oates fan, this novel will not change your mind. Oates fans, on the other hand, should enjoy this one completely.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Between one and none there lies an infinity, November 5, 2002

By	MICHAEL ACUNA (Southern California United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: I'll Take You There: A Novel (Hardcover)

In the mid 1970's, The Staple Singers had a hit song with "I'll Take You There." The latest Joyce Carol Oates novel shares that title. But whereas, Mavis Staple sings of enlightenment through religion and finding a passage to God and redemption, a "Stairway to Heaven" as it were, Oates sets her novel in a scholarly,philosophical milieu: in a place and among those who have a definite take on we humans and our place in the cosmos. A place that is decidedly non religious. Philosophers like Spinoza, Pascal and Locke are by nature the questioners as well as the suppliers of answers. This is the nature of Philosophical thought. And even though it may sound like Oates has written a treatise on Philosophy, she has not for with "I'll Take You There" Oates is back in her old stomping grounds of Obsession, unrequited love and passion unrewarded and unrecognized. As Anellia, our lead character says: "I was possessed by the wayward passion of one to whom passion is unknown; denied, and thwarted..."
Anellia (this is what she calls herself and her real name is never revealed), is a an extremely bright and unsophisticated young woman who secures a scholarship to a college in "Upstate New York," and proceeds to throw herself headfirst into college life. Anellia is remarkably ill equipped emotionally and socially to be away from her family much less a member of a sorority,but when she is asked to join Kappa Gamma Pi she jumps at the chance to be part of a "family" and to have sisters who she hopes will fill a void in her life ("...I yearned for sisters: I reasoned that I'd had the others: mother, father, brothers, grandparents...sisters! I would be happy forever, I think."). Anellia fakes it for as long as she can but sorority life is not for her: "My Kappa self did not brood, was never melancholy...she had clear skin, shining eyes, a glossy pageboy and lipsticked lips. She was no one I knew personally, but an inspired composite of a dozen Kappa girls..."
As with most of Oates' characters in many of her novels, Anellia is obsessed with food: "...it was the caterers cartons that caught my eye, the aftermath of Saturday night parties, leftover canapés, caviar jars where always caviar remained...sometimes I devoured these food where I stood, sometimes I stuffed them into my duffel bag to carry away...sometimes, stricken with remorse or fear of food poisoning, I threw everything away. I saw no contradiction with my ideal and my animal self. As Spinoza said, "We yearn to persist in our being."' In another instance, Anellia says:"...my mouth watered with saliva like rushing churning ants."
In the second section of the novel, "The Negro Lover," Anellia finds love and romance with one Vernor Matheius a PhD candidate in Philosophy:"...I'd fallen in love with a man's mere voice; not a radiant idea as I'd imagined but a physical condition, like grief."
As with most things for Anellia, love does not prove to be a panacea as she spends weeks stalking Vernor before he notices and speaks to her. Vernor is "the color of damp earth...a coppery maroon...skin that I imagined would be hot to the touch." At first Vernor will have nothing to do with Anellia, but later relents; feels a sort of compassion for Anellia and they begin an affair of sorts. "I can love you. I am the one who can love you. Who am I except the one whose sole identity is that she can love you?"
As Anellia had fashioned a sophisticated "personality" to be accepted for awhile in the sorority so she makes herself into someone Vernor can love: "Stark and simple and beautiful as gleaming white bones picked clean of all flesh, Now you know. Yet I lived in dread of the one day I would fall utterly and irrevocably into pieces and would lack the strength, the will, the purpose, the faith to reassemble myself another time."
The last section of the novel, "The Way Out" deals with Anellia coming to terms with her father's impending death. As much as the first two sections were red with the fire and explosiveness of emotions, "The Way Out" is blue and green with the fragrance of remorse and acceptance. Set in Utah, Oates makes much of the open spaces, the romantic and exotic place names:"...Green river, San Rafael Valley, Death Hollow..." For Oates the West is a place where one can re-imagine oneself and start anew. And likewise, Anellia finds a kind of peace and resolution to at least some of her problems and we are allowed to feel, not only compassion for her but also a good amount of pride for she is ultimately a survivor and not merely a victim.
"I'll Take You There" is Oates at the top of her very formidable form. The writing is plump and round and gorgeous, bursting with compassion and wit and beautifully evoking a world slightly askew, resolutely strange but ultimately an intriguing place to visit.