The Falls: A Novel (P.S.) (Paperback)

by Joyce Carol Oates (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's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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 victi