The Falls: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "At the time unknown, unnamed, the individual who was to throw himself into the Horseshoe Falls appeared to the gatekeeper of the Goat Island Suspension..." (more)
Key Phrases: guard railing, dairy maid, lawfully wedded wife, Dirk Burnaby, Niagara Falls, Love Canal (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Oates is not only on her authentically rendered home ground in this sprawling novel set in the city of Niagara Falls during the 1950s, she is also writing at the top of her form. Her febrile prose is especially appropriate to a story as turbulent as the tumultuous waters that have claimed many lives over the years. Widowed on her wedding night when her new husband, a young minister and latent homosexual, throws himself into the falls, Ariah Littrell, the plain, awkward daughter of a minister, henceforth considers herself damned. Her bleak future becomes miraculously bright when Dirk Burnaby, a handsome, wealthy bon vivant with an altruistic heart, falls in love with the media-dubbed Widow-Bride. Their rapturous happiness is shadowed only by Ariah's illogical conviction over the years that Dirk will leave her and their three children someday. Her unreasonable fear becomes self-fulfilling when her increasingly unstable behavior, combined with Dirk's obsessed but chaste involvement with Nina Olshaker, a young mother who enlists his help in alerting the city fathers to the pestilential conditions in the area later to be known as Love Canal, opens a chasm in their marriage. His gentle heart inspired by a need for justice, Dirk takes on the powerful, corrupt politicians, his former peers and pals, in a disastrous lawsuit that ruins him socially and financially and results in his death. Oates adroitly addresses the material of this "first" class action lawsuit and makes the story fresh and immediate. "In the end, all drama is about family," a character muses, and while the narrative occasionally lapses into melodrama in elucidating this theme, Oates spins a haunting story in which nature and humans are equally rapacious and self-destructive.
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From The Washington Post

For 40 years, Joyce Carol Oates has maintained a creative dialogue with the roiling cauldron of contemporary American culture, writing unflinchingly about the oddities that bubble up into the headlines. Beginning with her 1966 classic short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," which was inspired by the tabloid psychopath known as the "Pied Piper of Tucson," she has been equally at ease creating empathetic fictional portraits of the marginalized (the strong-willed daughter of a migrant worker in her 1967 novel A Garden of Earthly Delights, a serial sex killer in Zombie, 1995) and those anointed with the mixed blessing of fame (the protagonist of Black Water, published in 1992 and based on a Chappaquiddick-like accident; Marilyn Monroe in her 2000 novel Blonde). Oates frequently examines the lives of American families balancing precariously on the edge of social, financial or psychological ruin (in her 2001 novel We Were the Mulvaneys, an "ideal" American family deteriorates after the teenage daughter is raped).

In her hypnotic new novel, The Falls, Oates juxtaposes a majestic and dangerous natural phenomenon -- the Falls at Niagara -- with a man-made monstrosity, the deadly witches' brew of nuclear and toxic waste known as Love Canal -- as the threatening elements underlying a family saga of self-destruction and redemption.

As Oates points out in her front matter, the nation's honeymoon capital has a dark side: In the Victorian era the Falls -- the American, the Bridal Veil and the Horseshoe -- were thought to exert an uncanny, malevolent and hypnotic spell, luring their victims to throw themselves in. By 1900 Niagara Falls had become a "Suicide's Paradise."

The novel begins at 6:15 a.m. on June 12, 1950, when the gatekeeper of the Goat Island Suspension Bridge at Niagara Falls notices a distracted man hurrying by. Suspecting a suicide, the gatekeeper follows but fails to prevent the man from throwing himself into the Horseshoe Falls.

Back in the honeymoon suite of a grand 19th-century resort hotel, Ariah, Gilbert Erskine's newlywed wife of 21 hours, awakes to an empty bed, a hangover and a suicide note: "The hurt. The humiliation. The unspeakable shame." Pale, red-haired Ariah is a minister's daughter, sheltered from the ways of the flesh. Her husband, a minister, was equally naive. It is clear that both have been shocked by the physicality of the wedding night. But his disappearance is not a proven suicide for seven suspenseful days and nights. During this week Ariah keeps mum about the note and haunts the area around the Falls, gathering a nascent legendary status as "the Widow-Bride."

Dirk Burnaby, a prominent Niagara Falls attorney, finds himself drawn to Ariah in her dramatic distress. He doesn't know why, but Oates gives us a pointed hint by describing his eccentric, narcissistic mother -- Claudine Burnaby, a former Buffalo debutante so grieved at the loss of her attractiveness that she has gone into hiding in the 23-room family estate.

Dirk protects Ariah from her parents, who have installed themselves in the hotel to await the outcome of the search for Gilbert, and her in-laws, who insist their son could not have committed suicide. When Gilbert's bloated body rises to the surface several miles below Horseshoe Falls after a week of spinning in the mammoth frothing maelstrom known as the "Devil's Whirlpool," Ariah insists upon identifying him. Then she collapses.

Dirk pursues Ariah back to her hometown of Troy, and within a month of her first marriage, they are wed. Later, realizing she is pregnant, Ariah frets about which of her husbands is the father of her firstborn, Chandler. When her second son, Royall, is born, eight years later, there is no doubt of his resemblance to Dirk. Their daughter Juliet is born, and the Burnabys seem the happy prosperous family. But sinister undercurrents at work in the world around them exert a psychic pull on Dirk. Shortly after Juliet's birth, he succumbs once more to the lure of a distraught woman whom he thinks of as "the Woman in Black." He is as obsessed with her as he once was with Ariah, but his focus is professional. Nina Olshaker is a young mother whose daughter has died of leukemia. She suspects that the cause was pollution, the thick smelly muck that oozes up in basements throughout the neighborhood built upon the area once known as Love Canal. Dirk is the only lawyer in town willing to represent her. In pursuit of justice for the "Woman in Black," he alienates family and friends. He loses the case; a week later his car plunges through a guard rail into the Niagara River. His body is never found.

Ariah believes she is cursed, that the suicide of her first husband led to the death of the second. Although she shields her children from information about their father, she passes along her anxieties. The family lives in "near destitution," and the youngsters grow up hearing schoolyard taunts, "Burn-a-by! Shame, shame's the name!" The novel, always fast-moving, gathers even more momentum as Ariah's sons reach manhood and begin to explore the mystery of their father's death, and her daughter, a dreamy teenager, hears voices calling her to join her father. To save themselves and their sister, Chandler and Royall must confront the family's deepest secrets.

The Falls takes as its historic moment the latter half of the 20th century, when the age of conformity was dissolving into the Vietnam era. Yet it displays the sumptuous detail and breathless narrative of a 19th-century epic. The archetypal images of the Falls, the Devil's Whirlpool, the honeymoon suite, the Widow-Bride and the Woman in Black emphasize its gothic roots.

With inimitable virtuosity, Oates weaves the still potent lore of Niagara into her extensive narrative. Using imagery of the river and falls as a driving force, she creates a seamless and engrossing flow that in the end seems natural, inevitable. Once you reach the dread stretch of whitewater rapids in the Niagara River called the Deadline, there is no turning back -- you are committed to going over the Falls. At this point, Oates writes, "You realize that the speed, the propulsion, has nothing to do with you. It is something happening to you." Such is the experience of reading the latest from this bountiful, endlessly curious and increasingly masterful writer.

Reviewed by Jane Ciabattari
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1 edition (September 14, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060722282
• ISBN-13: 978-0060722289
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (85 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #466,755 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars hard to characterize, March 15, 2005

By	EriKa "E" (Iceland) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

If I have learned anything in my recent and voracious reading of Joyce Carol Oates's exhaustive library of works, it is not only that she is a prolific writer but one of elegant prose and expertly woven stories. She manages gripping detail, driving the reader on to find out what's next, even when there is nothing really happening. The spellbinding nature of The Falls (Niagara Falls itself) is clearly illustrated, but what of the supposedly spellbinding nature of the main character of this novel, Ariah? I was not able to see what Dirk, the wealthy playboy who falls in love with and marries Ariah after she is widowed, sees in her. Maybe that is part of the overarching mystery. The story has a strange beginning-staged, unhappy marriage ended on the wedding night by suicide, which extends into an unconventional and fortuitous marriage for the so-called Widow Bride, Ariah. Despite the complexity and unstable nature of Ariah's character (and her belief that Dirk would somehow leave her sooner or later) I also don't see the logical progression of other aspects of her character... how did she change to become the woman she became? Was it wealth? Was it the attentions of Dirk, whom so many others had failed to capture? In any case, the grace and elegance of the story almost makes you forget that there is very little happening for long stretches of this book.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Niagara Flow, November 7, 2004

By	Janis Rothermel (Longport, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is one of my top books this year. I loved the story(ies), the characters and the setting. Ms. Oates characters are beautifully defined with enough room to form one's own mind with persoanl fill in here and there. I could see these characters. I often felt like I was in the room with them (behind a curtain, of course). It is a terrific saga with hidden innuendos and opinions that the reader learns about in its appropriate time. I learned a lot about the Niagara Falls area. Having been a visitor there once, it expanded my own idea of the place-its history, socio-economics, its evolution from an old, grand tourist destination to a modern one and the environs. I learned about struggle. I was reminded that often where we sometimes believe someone's heart is, is not really where it is at all. I was reminded that one's life can change in a flash, not only one's circumstances, but one's entire belief system. And again, how quickly it will or can change again. And through it all am reminded how humans cope, and how differently they cope. The struggles, the triumphs, the pain, the joy were all here. I liked every one of these characters. I felt like I knew each one, and in fact wanted to know each one. Ms.Oates led the pace of the story well. Her ending was appropriate and left room for more. I highly recommend this book, and am delighted that Ms. Oates is a premiere American writer who I know I can look forward to reading more of her works in the years ahead. Thank you, Ms. Oates for a great book, well written and so well crafted.

31 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Niagara, September 14, 2004

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

Niagara Falls and its many cataracts (Horseshoe Falls as in this novel, for one) has always been an easy target for those who feel there is no way out but suicide. And in Joyce Carol Oates new novel, "The Falls" it is Gilbert, husband of Ariah who does just that. The gatekeeper of Horseshoe Falls says of the Falls' mesmerizing attraction: "Like we're sick of ourselves. Mankind...this is the way out."
After the suicide of her husband, Gilbert, Ariah feels that her life is doomed. This is the 1950's in a small American town and she is looked at as the cause rather than the victim. Then she meets Dirk Burnaby, a lawyer (called "the Savior) involved with the victims of the Love Canal: a place filled with air that pollutes and kills and obviously represents all that is wrong with humanity...it's a wellspring of moral and physical decay. Burnaby is head-over-heels in love with Ariah and at first he only watches while she mourns: "He wanted to stand close behind her...and put his arms around her. He wanted for himself this ferocity of attention, this loyalty. He couldn't believe that Erskine deserved it. He hated the man, detested him, that, though dead, he should captivate the woman...So deeply in love with Ariah, he could barely see any longer; as one is unable to see one's own mirror reflection, pushed too close..."
Oates is after something different here and she uses the Love Canal disaster as a backdrop to track the Burnaby Family and her keen sense of the psychological makeup of character and her brilliant sense of social and familial mores makes "The Falls" a major work in the Oates canon. She uses all of her powers here: the facility with the family and its politics (Mulvaneys), her use of violence and degradation ("I'll Take You There") and her sense of the Gothic (The Barrens).
Anyone who has stood in a crevice of one of the cataracts of the Niagara Falls can identify with what Oates writes about that ethereal feeling: "Here, your veins, arteries, the minute precision and perfection of your nerves will be unstrung in an instant."
With this novel, Oates is at the zenith of her writing powers and not only is her prose fat, juicy and unbelievably gorgeous, it is also both lyrical and forceful. In "The Falls," she's after the recreation of Life, of Love and most importantly of Hope and inevitably, Redemption.