Childwold

by Joyce Carol Oates

This is the story of an enchantment and its dramatic consequences. At the centre is the frustrated love of a man in his forties for a fourteen-year-old girl whom he meets and befriends.
Drawn into her strange family and the haunting world of Childwold, he discovers that, while others find freedom for themselves, for him there is no escape. (From cover)

"[A] blowsy mother whose many children have many fathers; her 14-year-old daughter, Laney, and Kasch, an anguished intellectual who loves them both...The novel's tight Oedipal triangle opens into a triple alliance against age and aggression as each person tries to turn the biological clock back towards innocence. Laney's mother wants to bear children to narrow the world to a child's room. Laney starves herself to stop her menstrual cycle and prolong her childhood. Kasch in his insanity is harmless, nonsexual, helpless...Drawn by his vulnerability in the same way that Kasch was drawn by her poverty, Laney may cling to Kasch and he to her as children cling together in the dark." (New York Times, 11/28/76)

Genres: Fiction, Literature, American, Novels

246 pages, Hardcover

First published November 12, 1976

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Narrative easing out of dense fog. Or a camera focusing, slowly, from queasy blur. Disjointed run-ons. Description without object. Unsteady perspective: a character can recur in first person, second person, third person. Even in this reeling high modernist fashion, the five principle characters are warmly, believably rendered, all with interesting personal histories and psychology. Their voices can run together a bit in Oates' stream-of-consciousness, but I wasn't especially bothered. The central story, beneath all the embellishment, is a fairly simple one of a lonely middle-aged man who finds himself infatuated (self-destructively?) with a teenage girl, and so evoked bits of American Beauty and Ghostworld. But it is convincing conveyed here, and what can I say, I'm a sucker for this kind of embellishment (exactly the embellishment the other reviewers here apparently hated) and the prose is often beautiful. I wonder why this book seems to have fallen through the cracks. Perhaps Oates other work from this era is better -- or at least more approachable.

I bought this on a whim, purely on the basis of the eerie evocative title and the fact I've never read anything from Oates besides scattered more recent short stories, and I was not disappointed.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

A difficult and complex narrative with a stream of consciousness approach that shifts rapidly between three or four viewpoints to create a dizzying and grim exploration of White Trash, love, and failure.

[SmarterLilac · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times dull, at times restlessly experimental, this book is like a lot of Oates' lesser works—too much filler undermining an otherwise interesting premise and plot.

[Carole Sklar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such stunning, evocative writing. Love the book.
Am reading this 1970's work again. The pandemic has cause me to search my own collection of books.Joyce Carol Oates' writing has always surprised me. Whatever her subject, she succeeds
in capturing my full attention. Can't wait to get back to it and its tragic characters.

[Kristel]

Cet ouvrage est d'une lecture exigeante à l'issue de laquelle on se sent récompensé. Plusieurs passages descriptifs et énumérations m'ont fait penser à du Zola.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I tend to always find Oates' novels compelling to varying degrees, this novel became somewhat tedious and repetitive for me around the half-way point.

I admired and appreciated the experimental style she employs here, a style which contrasts nicely with her more realistic and direct novels like them or Do With Me What You Will. But rather than carrying the narrative to a higher plane of consciousness, as I imagine was her intention with using the device of stream-of-consciousness, towards the novel's midpoint I felt the story begin to veer into melodrama territory, at which point the style could not save the tone from turning excessively lurid.

Overall, a mixed reading experience for me. She's done much better, both before and since 1976.

[Rae · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.25/5 stars

This is probably one of my least favorite novels by Joyce Carol Oates so far. I didn’t particularly like the story or the characters in this book and I found it to be difficult to follow at times. Overall, I didn’t enjoy this as much as Oates’s previous novels.

[Jennie Rogers · Rating 3 out of 5]

american gothic, small town poverty. Surrealistic & hard to follow but beautiful in parts.

[Ruth Martinez · Rating 2 out of 5]

This will be my last Oates novel, they are overall just too depressing. I do enjoy her prose poem style, her lush descriptions etc, so 2 stars.

[Chip · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in the 70s, in the self-conscious style that was popular then. The story is a Lolita-esque relationship between a barely teenaged girl and a shell-shocked veteran of the Vietnam war, seen through a fog of suggestion, fantasy, and dream sequences. It is very difficult to pick out exactly what happens, but it is clear that something does, based upon the reactions of the characters. Another of Oates' "Yewville" stories. JCO today writes with authority and a clear eye, but this book is from early in her career and the clarity isn't there. She recently publicly asked if Nabokov should be called a "child predator" for writing Lolita (in the wake of the furor over Woody Allen's Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Pictures amid accusations of child abuse from a step-daughter (to which I point out that it doesn't help that Allen married another step-daughter - it tends to support the accuser's claim)). To that I ask if Oates considers herself a "child predator" for writing Childwold? Having read Lolita and Childwold, my answer is "no" but I genuinely wonder what Oates would say.

[Kay · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm a die hard Oates fan, but I couldn't make it past the first ten pages of stream-of-consciousness rambling, almost entirely without actual events and context of any kind. Maybe someday I will have the motivation to pick it up and try again.