The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel (P.S.) (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: chautauqua falls, banana hat, quick degrees, Hazel Jones, Jacob Schwart, Miss Lutter (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. At the beginning of Oates's 36th novel, Rebecca Schwart is mistaken by a seemingly harmless man for another woman, Hazel Jones, on a footpath in 1959 Chatauqua Falls, N.Y. Five hundred pages later, Rebecca will find out that the man who accosted her is a serial killer, and Oates will have exercised, in a manner very difficult to forget, two of her recurring themes: the provisionality of identity and the awful suddenness of male violence. There's plenty of backstory, told in retrospect. Rebecca's parents escape from the Nazis with their two sons in 1936; Rebecca is born in the boat crossing over. When Rebecca is 13, her father, Jacob, a sexton in Milburn, N.Y., kills her mother, Anna, and nearly kills Rebecca, before blowing his own head off. At the time of the footpath crossing, Rebecca is just weeks away from being beaten, almost to death, by her husband, Niles Tignor (a shady traveling beer salesman). She and son Niley flee; she takes the name of the woman for whom she has been recently mistaken and becomes Hazel Jones. Niley, a nine-year-old with a musical gift, becomes Zacharias, "a name from the bible," Rebecca tells people. Rebecca's Hazel navigates American norms as a waitress, salesperson and finally common-law wife of the heir of the Gallagher media fortune, a man in whom she never confides her past. Oates is our finest novelistic tracker, following the traces of some character's flight from or toward some ultimate violence with forensic precision. There are allusions here to the mythic scouts of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, who explored the same New York territory when it was primeval woods. Many of the passages are a lot like a blown-up photo of a bruise—ugly without seeming to have a point. Yet the traumatic pattern of the hunter and the hunted, unfolded in Rebecca/Hazel's lifelong escape, never cripples Hazel: she is liberated, made crafty, deepened by her ultimately successful flight. Like Theodore Dreiser, Oates wears out objections with her characters, drawn in an explosive vernacular. Everything in this book depends on Oates' ability to bring a woman before the reader who is deeply veiled—whose real name is unknown even to herself—and she does it with epic panache. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Brian Hall

In the final lines of Joyce Carol Oates's big new novel, The Gravedigger's Daughter, a cousin writes to a cousin, "Yet I think I should come to Lake Worth, to see you. Should I?" The blank pages that follow reverberate not only with silence and loss but also -- and this is Oates's peculiar magic -- with disbelief on the part of the reader that the words could stop, that the question could go unanswered. For Oates often gives the impression, as she does so magnificently here, that she could go on forever. Or that in fact she does go on, as she was already going before the opening words, only those pages don't happen to be printed in this book.

For many novelists, quantity is damaging to quality, but Oates's power springs directly from her prodigality. Her genius -- the only word for the alarming thing that so evidently possesses her -- happens to be a giant. And the reader's intimation that this huge-handed, league-striding, voracious monster is somehow speaking, whispering, howling through her is what gives to her writing the illusion that it's all real, that anything messy, maladroit or unsatisfactory in her books is not a fault in her shaping, but a reflection of the faulty world.

This kind of genius usually has a locus, and for Oates it's the gritty, laboring, underfed, inbred backwaters of upstate New York. She has returned there again and again. This time she's fixed her gaze on a family of immigrants who flee Nazi Germany in 1936 to fetch up in a small town somewhere south of Niagara Falls. They are not Jews, insists the father, Jacob Schwart, and he'll repeat it as often as necessary. As for the word itself -- "Jew" -- he instructs his children, with a hard slap in the face, "Never say it." The past is dead.

Unfortunately, the Schwart family has more or less died with it. Aptly, they live in a cemetery, where Jacob works as the caretaker. In Germany he was a math teacher and a skilled pressman, but in America, supposed land of second chances, he climbs daily out of the grave he's just dug like some undead creature with a frozen, embittered will. His wife, Anna, is a half-mad ghost haunting the damp stone cottage by the cemetery gate. The very water the family drinks from the well is clouded with the fluids, the spirits, of the dead.

The older son, Herschel, a lout who loses his German without ever quite gaining English, flees town after committing a crime. The younger son, August, walks away forever after suffering one too many cruelties from his father. Neither of them utters a word of parting to their only sister, the young Rebecca, the gravedigger's daughter, whose story this is. They've learned their lesson: "Never say it." The past is dead, or will be as soon as you strangle it.

It's a lesson Rebecca learns as well, and she will act on it more than once in the four decades of her life that this novel covers. Oates understands the shame that survivors carry with them, and the lacunae in their stories that are fenced off by that shame. Jacob's shame, and Anna's horror, is the unnamed betrayal he committed to enable his family to escape Germany. Rebecca's shame is Jacob and Anna, their marriage blighted by that original act, which liberated their bodies and imprisoned their souls. Rebecca's defenses are silence and invisibility. The only game she ever played with her father, the only way in which he made her happy, was when she followed him in the cemetery as a very young girl and he pretended not to see her. Her only treasured childhood possession is a dictionary won in a spelling bee that she keeps hidden, unopened and mildewing, under her bed. Her name on the presentation label is misspelled.

No matter. She will change her name, and change it again. She will flee her first home when it explodes in violence, flee a second without saying goodbye to the guardian who loves her, and flee a third when male violence comes crashing back into her life. She will rename herself after a dead woman and discover that when she's acting from behind that pale smiling mask, people find her more alive than they ever found Rebecca Schwart. She will rename her young son after a disembodied voice in the night (a radio DJ) and live to see him become more substantial than his namesake. She will discover that when you kill the past, you free it to haunt you.

This is neither a depressing story nor an uplifting one. Oates succeeds here, as she often does, in making such judgments feel simple-minded. What it all seems is true and therefore moving and somewhat terrible, but in an exhilarating way. Every aspect of the ungainly plot feels right, including its ungainliness. Resolutions fail to arrive; lost people fail to return. Flowing through and past it all, surfacing for these 600 pages, is Oates's turbulent, cross-currented prose, with its hot upwellings and icy eddies. It's the opposite of lapidary, and has the disadvantage of being impossible to quote effectively in a brief review, but for the enthralled reader, Oates's water will eventually have its proverbial way with other writers' stone.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061236837
• ISBN-13: 978-0061236839
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (64 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #42,826 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A treatise on family identity, March 31, 2008

By	Jessica Lux (Rosamond, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Gravedigger's Daughter (Hardcover)

The central character of Joyce Carol Oates's 36th novel changes her identity several times in the course of the epic, conveniently changing portions of her brutal past to transform into a more pure, acceptable lady. In her heart, she remains the Gravedigger's Daughter, the American-born daughter of WWII-era Jewish immigrants Jacob and Anna Schwart. Jacob was humiliated by his stateside job as the local cemetery caretaker, which afforded his family a life of squalor from which Anna slowly withdrew into catatonic madness. As the family spiraled violently out of control in the racist small-town atmosphere of 1940's upstate New York, Rebecca Schwart was orphaned as a young teenager.

Forced to reinvent herself as a charity case, a ward of the state, Rebecca begins to suppress the violent secrets of her past and emerge as a reliable, hard-working girl with no family, but also with no ghosts in her past and no need for anyone's pity. As Rebecca works her way up in society, earning legitimacy through marriage and motherhood, she hears the echoes of her father's harsh words to her. "In animal life the weak are quickly disposed of. So you must hide your weakness, Rebecca." The Gravedigger's Daughter is a novel about identity, and the lengths to which we will go to suppress our past to gain the acceptance of others. Rebecca ascends into a life of privilege, but not without looking over her shoulder for past demons.

Rebecca is guarded throughout the novel--to outsiders, to herself, and to the reader--proving herself an unreliable narrator, but the reader who is frustrated by this must remember that Rebecca is unreliable to herself, deluding herself to survive in an impossibly bleak world. The most compelling portions of this dense novel, which is told in three parts, center on the resilience of Rebecca in her quest for legitimacy and acceptance. The gravedigger's daughter first transforms her identity after the childhood loss of her family and later flees from an abusive, murderous husband to live under the assumed name of Hazel Jones. Unfortunately, Oates wrote her story not about these two metamorphoses, but in three portions, so the book opens with an overwrought, dreary exposition about the struggle of an immigrant family working in low-skilled jobs in a new country.

The plight of the immigrant family is close to Oates's heart--the author worked for over a decade on this novel to honor her family heritage. As an adult, Oates discovered that her own grandmother was Jewish (a secret that was buried in the 1890's to assimilate into the United States). Oates knew her grandmother, but no one in the family knew of her religious heritage or the last name she had abandoned upon arriving in the United States. In an interview with Edmund White, Oates revealed, "My grandmother had experiences very similar to Rebecca's experience with her father. In actual life the man who was my great-grandfather was a gravedigger. He did not kill his wife; he did injure her, though. And he did threaten his daughter, and he did commit suicide with a shotgun. That's all true." Oates reveals how exactly her grandmother's experience inspired the life of Rebecca Schwart/Hazel Jones by insisting, "[She] was unfailing. She never was the girl whose father had almost killed her and blew his head off with a shotgun... She was never the woman whose husband had abused her and then left her. She never would have wanted to play those cards."

The Gravedigger's Daughter is an expansive portrait of American life from one of our most agile living storytellers. Oates may lose a reader or two with her opening ruminations on poverty and family structure for inland immigrants, but those who read on will be rewarded with a challenging drama of fortune and identity in America. In the end, you may love or hate this book, but it is hard not to admire it.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars In the mood or not?, July 24, 2008

By	Bookingitgirl (Lexington, SC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gravedigger's Daughter (Hardcover)

First I must say that this is the first book I have ever read by Joyce Carol Oates. This book is easy to get into, but once strapped in, be ready for the bumpy ride! There is no question (at least to me) about Ms. Oate's genius. I found myself reading passages repeatedly just to appreciate the complexity of word use and the fascinating mirror on humanity that Ms. Oate's holds up again and again in her story. There is a lot of violence in this book, however, I found its use necessary to the story. The story is about a strong woman's survival against incredible odds. I say that the book is a bumpy ride simply because the author flashes backwards and forwards in reality. When the book ended I felt somewhat dissafisfied and didn't know exactly why. However, I find myself thinking of the story and reflecting on the characters. So I think I am dissatisfied because I wanted the book to continue. In any case I recommend this book, however, this is not your "vacation" book. Be in the mood for heavy themes and startling insights into human nature.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oates explores impact of childhood abuse on development of woman's identity, July 6, 2008

By	Bruce J. Wasser (Lake Bluff, IL) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In "The Gravedigger's Daughter," Joyce Carol Oates explores the impact of childhood abuse on the development of a woman's identity. Her intricately designed and compelling novel details the brutal early life of Rebbeca Schwart and follows her into adulthood, one in which the grown woman casts off previous sufferings but never escapes their cruel shadow. The youngest child of an impoverished German Jewish immigrant family, Rebecca endures a barren early life that includes being subjected to an ill-tempered, violent father, the slow and tortured descent of her mother into mental illness and the callous disregard of her two insensitive older brothers.

Unable to endure the moral and spiritual poverty of their graveyard surroundings, Rebecca's brothers flee the wrath of their father and the hopelessness of their condition. Eventually, Rebecca witnesses the murder/suicide of her mother and father, an event whose impact reverberates throughout her life. Abandoned, traumatized and directionless, Rebecca must reinvent herself, first as a ward of the court, then as a wife and mother. It is Oates' brilliant depiction of a woman struggling to create a new self while simultaneously attempting to submerge her previous identity that gives "The Gravedigger's Daughter" its emotional impact. Rebecca's cryptic personae permit her to survive but never grant her existential peace.

What solace she savors derives from her brilliant but tormented son, he the product of one of the most nefarious characters of contemporary literature. Beguiled and then beaten by Niles Tignor, Rebecca re-experiences the controlling, violent outbursts that characterized her father. Her act of personal liberation, her reinvention of identity and her commitment to her child's wellbeing exemplify a quiet, implacable will to live. Always wary of being discovered, perpetually cautious and suspicious, Rebecca refuses to give herself away to any man or idea. She lives to survive.

Written with excruciating detail, "The Gravedigger's Daughter" is much more than an exploration of one woman's consciousness. Joyce Carol Oates has crafted a work that explicitly describes violence, directly confronts social injustice and sensitively describes how a thwarted human spirit heals itself. This is a novel that will unsettle and upset, but it is also a cautionary tale of how identity, however shattered, will undergo reformation and reinvention.