The Falls – Joyce Carol Oates

I’ve never been a big fan of the writing style of Joyce Carol Oates. At times her writing  seems to me awkward, a bit uneven and unfinished. But her widely acclaimed 2004 novel, The Falls, has a strange, muscular power that drew me in and caused me to lose myself in the very mist rising from those rampaging waters.

Niagara Falls has been known over the years to have a remarkable power to entrance, beguile, mesmerize… Suicidal persons often look for grand landmarks to mark their  passage. You have to be careful in such a place, especially if you are one of Oates’s characters.

Oates has made this extraordinary natural phenomenon personal to a disturbing degree. Her words create a timeless being of immense seductive power that waits for you and me with resolute patience, like Death itself.

The personalization of The Falls is one reason I like Oates’s novel, despite its flaws. The other two are the erratic and insulated Ariah Erskine, and the maddening story of Love Canal.

The novel begins with two virgin newlyweds groping their way toward marital consummation in a Niagara Falls hotel, the soon-would-have-been-too-old-to-be-married daughter of a Presbyterian minister and the primed-to-receive-his-own-parish-church young Presbyterian minister.

Intimacy between the young couple turns embarrassingly grotesque. Before the following morning has fully revealed itself, the groom has hurled himself to his death into the famous and unforgiving gorge.

In order to assert some degree of control over her circumstances, the shaken Ariah determines she is damned, identifies herself as a damned creature, and arranges to live her life with no expectations other than disaster.

Oates beautifully crafts those days of shock and disorientation, Ariah’s stubborn refusal to be overcome by her circumstances, and the ripple effects of the weird tragedy as family and community assess the groom’s unthinkable act. The Widow Bride of the Falls takes on a mythic quality as the years pass, an altogether distinct being from the real widow bride.

Ariah’s damnation perspective colors the rest of her life, and is only partly softened during a several-year period of relative happiness that corresponds to her second marriage. Dirk Burnaby, a local attorney and son of a wealthy family, inexplicably falls in love with the skinny near-spinster at first sight as she stands daily watch at the rail above the gorge, waiting for her groom’s bloated corpse to appear.

Burnaby’s love does not free Ariah from her persecution complex, however, as she remains the perpetually pursued fugitive. As a result, she forever dons the armor of cynicism and sarcasm, and refuses steadfastly to be controlled or broken by persons or circumstances.

She expects damnation to revisit her at any moment. It does, of course, the moment Burnaby decides to obey his conscience and represent working class families in their initial suit against an alliance of the powerful and wealthy – the chemical companies, developers, contractors, politicians, judges, medical establishment, and board of education of the city of Niagara Falls.

The brazen negligence and disregard for the life of the poor and working class people demonstrated by those responsible for the toxic waste site known as Love Canal is rendered with cutting precision by Oates.

As much as I found myself captivated by Burnaby’s heroically naïve and doomed attempt to Beat the Power on behalf of the disenfranchised, and by the story of Love Canal itself, this important element, because it is developed to too great an extent, gives the novel a fractured quality.

Love Canal and Burnaby’s quest take on a life of their own. Yes, it is because of what happens to Burnaby as a result of his involvement in Love Canal that we see Ariah’s fatalism come to fruition and her life and that of her children forever altered. The Burnaby Quest could have, and maybe should have, formed the basis for a separate novel, however. But because it remains such a prominent element in The Falls, which is really Ariah’s Story, Ariah is gradually reduced to secondary status.

Oates has too many stories to tell to fit into this one novel. Nonetheless, the content of the novel makes it a compelling read, its loose structure notwithstanding.

Are character’s italicized thoughts sprinkled throughout the novel necessary? I could have done without most of these phrases that have little meaning or fail to create mood. They get in the way, adding nothing to the narrative or to our understanding. Is there a necessary musical quality or cadence I am missing maybe?

A few of the sections are narrated in the first person by someone who at first sounds like one of Ariah’s children, Chandler, Royall, or Juliet. But you quickly realize the speaker has referred to the three siblings by name. So is this speaker a completely unaccounted-for fourth sibling? An unborn child? A ghost? I am perplexed….

Some characters seemed destined to play larger roles in the outcome of the story, but later simply exited like phantoms. I am thinking in particular of “the woman in black,” who reappears briefly years later to perform a curious act and then vanishes forever. To a lesser degree, Burnaby’s mother also seemed headed toward some significant moment, but then slipped silently off into the sunset.  The Holocaust survivor and widower, Joseph Pankowski, Ariah’s neighbor, also seemed destined to play a bigger role, but he too is dismissed without event.

A lot goes on in this novel, too much. Ariah’s story becomes lost in the second half of the novel. Very late in the story Oates introduces Bud Stonecrop, a strange, laconic, and physically powerful young man with a shaved head, who she invests with great sexual power. Conveniently, he ends up being the key to resolving the family’s uncertainties about their husband and father’s demise, and bringing closure and redemption to Ariah and her small brood. Interesting character, but he does seem a bit of an afterthought.

The Falls does have some wonderful moments, but Oates seemed to lose interest in Ariah as she went along. Ariah’s existential predicament, which should have been the foundation upon which to build the novel, is reduced to a series of superficial defense mechanisms and sarcastic remarks.

If Ariah will not show who she really is, and who she becomes in the end, shouldn’t Oates show the reader? A neat little resolution (forged by a new and lesser character) is attached to Ariah in the end, like a life-time achievement award, a plastic silver badge to wear on her second-hand blouse.

Tagged with: Ariah Erskine • Dirk Burnaby • Joyce Carol Oates • Love Canal • Niagara Falls • The Falls

Filed under: Authors • Book Talk

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