Angel of light

Format:

Book

Title:

Angel of light

Author:

Oates, Joyce Carol, 1938-

ISBN:

9780525054832

Edition:

1st ed.

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

xiii, 434 pages ; 25 cm

Contents:

The seduction Eyre, New York March 1980 -- Wild Loughrew Loughrea, Ontario, August 1947 -- The tryst New York City, April 1980 -- The storm Mount Dunvegan Island, Maine, July 1955 -- The convert Washington, D.C., May 1980 -- The game Bitterfeld Lake, July 1967 -- Night-Blooming Cereus Washington, D.C., -- The handshake Washington, D.C., June 1979 -- Twins Washington, D.C., September 1980.

Summary:

Maurice Halleck, Director of the Commission for the Ministry of Justice, is accused of wrongdoing and then dies in a suspicious car accident. A suicide note and confession are found. But are they legitimate, or was he coerced into writing them before he was taken out to be killed?

Subject(s):

Siblings -- Fiction.

Suicide victims -- Fiction.

Revenge -- Fiction.

Psychological fiction.

Political fiction.

American fiction -- 20th century.

Genre:

Psychological fiction.

Political fiction.

Fiction

Political fiction

Psychological fiction

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Willamina Public Library	FIC OAT	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Author Notes

Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Syracuse University and a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin.

She is the author of numerous novels and collections of short stories. Her works include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Bellefleur, You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, Because It Is My Heart, Solstice, Marya : A Life, and Give Me Your Heart. She has received numerous awards including the National Book Award for Them, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature. She was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her title Lovely, Dark, Deep. She also wrote a series of suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. In 2015, her novel The Accursed became listed as a bestseller on the iBooks chart.

She worked as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, before becoming the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She and her late husband Raymond J. Smith operated a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

Thanks to a fairly conventional thriller format, Oates' newest attempt to make feverish myth out of supposed American prototypes is far more manageable--if no more successful--than the rambling excesses of Bellefleur: it's a Washington, D.C. retelling of Aeschylus' Oresteia which tries, vaguely, to hook up the themes of personal betrayal and revenge with the politics of treason and terrorism. Maurice Halleck, Director of the (imaginary) Federal Commission for the Ministry of Justice, is dead in an apparent car-crash suicide following a bribery scandal (connected to investigations into the Allende affair). But Maurice's high-strung teenage daughter Kirsten is convinced that her father was murdered--for domestic and perhaps political reasons--by chic mother Isabel and her lover Nicholas Martens, Maurie's old pal and colleague at the Commission. So, fixed on a double revenge-killing, Kirsten/Electra hysterically demands active support from low-key older brother Owen--an undergraduate who (in a totally implausible sequence) rinds his half-hearted commitment to matricide becoming politicized into manic revolutionary bloodlust, via seduction by an elegant, homosexual gum of international terrorism. (""Our acts are to confirm justice. . . . They will not be acts of personal vengeance--we've gone beyond that."") And meanwhile Oates provides flashback background on the Maurie/isabel/Nick triangle: young Nick saving schoolmate Maurie's life on a canoeing trip; the philosophical split between pragmatist Nick (handsome, popular) and idealist Maurie (monkey-faced, a loner); the routine guilts of the adultery and subsequent deceit. But the relationships and motivations remain unlifelike and murky--as does the significance of the political corruption (Nick's) which becomes entangled with personal betrayal. And the limp attempt to weight the Kirsten/Owen conspiracy with revolutionary politics (Oates makes them descendants of John Brown, quasi-terrorist hero) is merely longwinded, with pages of terrorism rhetoric and data. Finally, then, there's only the melodrama of the revenge--Kirsten seduces and nearly kills Nick, Owen kills Isabel (""Bitch. Cunt. Murderer. Mother"") and others, kamikaze-style--followed by the clearing of Maurie's name by a transformed, reclusive Nick. True, Oates' prose, though slack and repetitive, is generally readable this time around. And occasional glimmers of issues worth exploring (""What a person is in secret, he becomes--in politics"") do surface. But once again it seems as if Oates catches a glimpse of a thematic construct, then throws words at it from all directions--with blurry, inflated, and uninvolving results. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.