Review by New York Times Review
AT THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM, an exhibit called "War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath," which went up in November, featured a photograph by Nina Berman of a young Marine sergeant, Ty Ziegel, who was horrifically injured and disfigured by a suicide bomb in Iraq in 2004. Returning home, he underwent scores of surgeries and in 2006 married his sweetheart in Illinois. The marriage didn't last, and Ziegel died in December 2012. But nobody who saw the "Marine Wedding" series will be able to forget him - or the damage wrought by war on his body, his life and his family. Joyce Carol Oates's new novel puts the homecoming of a similarly wounded warrior at its center, doing with words what the Berman portraits did with images. "Carthage" begins on a Sunday afternoon in upstate New York, in the "hot humid insect-breeding midsummer of 2005." Zeno Mayfield, a powerful, confident man used to being in command of any situation, sinks to the ground in despair in the woods not far from the village of Carthage, where he once served as mayor. Spotting the carcass of a deer, he has mistaken it for the body of his missing 19-year-old daughter, Cressida, for whom the town has mobilized a search party, although Zeno insists she isn't "missing," just lost. The night before, Cressida - a prickly, brainy yet childish girl - had uncharacteristically lied to her father and gone to a rowdy lakeside tavern, where she met with her sister Juliet's fiancé, Brett Kincaid, a Carthage High football star turned war hero. A few months earlier, Brett had returned from the Iraq war, an "intraocular lens in his mangled left eye. Titanium implant holding together the broken skull. The skin/skins of his face stitched together." Beautiful, pious Juliet had welcomed him back with open arms, but her fiancé shrank from her. Yearning for him to confide in her again, Juliet plaintively reflected: "I've seen documentaries on TV. I think I know what it was like, in a way." But Cressida scornfully tells her older sister she's "too happy" and "too shallow" to understand her mutilated partner. "I am the only one who understands you, Brett," Cressida tells him, the night of her disappearance. The next morning, Carthage cops find the hero soldier by the side of the road in his bloodied Jeep, hung over and incoherent. But there is no trace of Cressida. Zeno Mayfield drives to Brett's mother's house and demands to see her son's room. Later in the day, Zeno will ask his wife, Arlette, who already regards Brett as family, the unthinkable question: "D'you think - he did something to her?" During the search in the woods, however, Zeno refuses to admit this thought. "She is all right," he tells himself. "Of course, Cressida is all right." It isn't until he sees the "part-devoured doe" that he falls to his knees, fear and confusion clouding his vision. "It is a terrible thing how swiftly a man's strength can drain from him, like his pride," Oates writes. Her novel shows that it isn't only men who are vulnerable to such abrupt diminishment. Women and children, soldiers and civilians, entire communities are just as susceptible to the sudden removal of autonomy and identity. How can they recover from such a reversal? "Carthage" asks. "After a death in the family there will be a seismic realignment among survivors," Zeno muses. Brett Kincaid is still living, but in his mind he "died when the grenade exploded." Juliet is alive, but grieves because the man she loves looks at her as if she's "a stranger." And what of Cressida? She is absent, but is she dead? In Zeno's dreams, she remains alive: "Not his daughter as he remembered her but as a wrathful though silent female figure, a daughter out of mythology." The title of this novel resonates with classically tragic overtones, which the author clearly intends. The word "Carthage" summons thoughts of the ancient world: of Virgil's jilted Dido, queen of Carthage, spurned by Aeneas, who put service to nation above love. It also recalls St. Augustine's contempt for his youthful dissipation in his "Confessions": "To Carthage then I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a caldron of unholy loves." T.S. Eliot wove St. Augustine's self-recriminating words into "The Waste Land," deepening its subtext of sexual regret. And now Oates draws on those archetypes to lend context and gravitas to the tragedies of our own time, plumbing their mythic force. Even her characters' names underscore her intention. Zeno is named after the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher famed for his paradoxes. He gave his daughters the names of doomed Shakespearean heroines to make them "special." "The Mayfield girls were like the daughters of a fairy-tale king," Oates observes, the "smart one" and the "pretty one," the nerd and the prom queen - each prey to "an old, unresolved rivalry." At 12, Cressida upbraided Zeno for giving her the name of a faithless woman, saying she felt "accursed." "Oh, honey, come on," her father had chided. "We don't believe in 'fate' in the U.S. of A. in 1996." But "Carthage" reminds readers that misfortunes that feel like "fate" happen all the time, in life and in the U.S. of A. If fate isn't responsible, to whom does blame belong? Oates sets this question against a richly textured small-town backdrop and lets her characters tell the story in alternating passages and sometimes whole chapters, in the manner of a Greek chorus made up of soloists. "Time moved now in zig-zag leaps," she writes, calamity's broken clock. One by one, the narrators relay their blinkered understanding of what has befallen them, prolonging the reader's uneasy search for the truth of what happened that muggy night at Wolf's Head Lake. In an eerie prologue, Cressida calls up the image of "a girl's lifeless body, possibly an unclothed body on or in the ground, sticky with blood." But since no body is found, what is the import of that vision? Early on, in a meandering seven-hour videotaped interrogation, Brett Kincaid confesses to killing Cressida. But he has no memory of the girl's death. "He'd hit her, or maybe he'd shoved her," he guesses, before lapsing into confused hallucinations of his platoon's grisly attack on an Iraqi family in Kirkuk. Is Brett guilty of Cressida's death, or of anything at all? Arlette Mayfield is afraid to enter her missing daughter's bedroom to hunt for clues, conditioned by memories of her daughter's caustic accusations ("Not snooping - are you?" the girl used to say) and by her husband's criticism of her "catastrophizing" ways. "A woman's love can be a burden," Zeno thinks, resenting his wife's solicitude. "She values your life more than you can possibly." Yet the same can be true of a man's love: Long after Cressida's disappearance, Zeno clings to the hope that "if he persevered, if he did not despair, he would find her." Oates sends her characters on separate, painful journeys toward self-knowledge, slowly cycling them back to Carthage. The "toxic afterlife" of the crime haunts both the Mayfields and the Kincaids, but it taints the victim's family more: "The shimmering-sick phosphorescence of scandal accrued to a name: Mayfield." Even once-mild Juliet has come to blame her sister more than the man accused of killing her: "I will hate her forever, for ruining my love," she thinks, while outwardly showing only a dissembling calm. "We can't judge her," Zeno insists. "I do judge her. Harshly," Juliet thinks. And yet, again and again, Oates shows how perilous it is to assign guilt, and how hard it is to draw the line between victim and perpetrator in a blurred moral landscape in which every crime, on the battlefield or on the home front, is a crime of conscience. LIESL SCHILLINGER is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 9, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
After her lavishly imagined, supernatural historical novel, The Accursed (2013), Oates turns in the latest of her intensely magnified studies of a family in crisis and the agony of a misfit girl. Zeno Mayfield, a former mayor of the small Adirondack town of Carthage, and his wife, Arlette, have two daughters. Juliet is as good as she is beautiful. Cressida is difficult. Smart, spiky, gnomish, and artistic, inky-frizzy haired Cressida may be autistic. Sweet Juliet gets engaged to handsome, civic-minded Brett Kincaid, who promptly enlists after 9/11. He returns severely injured, horribly scarred, and deeply traumatized. Then Cressida disappears, and grief decimates her loving family. Flashbacks to Brett's hellish experiences in Iraq carry a powerful indictment of war crimes, while a harrowing visit to a maximum-security prison by an enigmatic investigative writer exposes the horrors of incarceration and capital punishment. Oates' eerie, plangent, and gripping tale of a missing 19-year-old outcast and a betrayed warrior pivots on her interpretations of Cressida's medieval namesake, who abandoned one soldier for another, and Zeno's paradox concerning infinity within the finite as a state of perpetual yearning. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Oates will stay in the spotlight as The Accursed comes out in paperback, and Carthage is vigorously promoted in all media formats.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Oates (The Accursed) returns with another novel that ratchets up the unsettling to her signature feverish pitch. Beginning with an attention-grabbing opener that begets addictive reading-Zeno Mayfield and a search party are on the hunt for Mayfield's missing 19-year-old daughter, Cressida, in the Adirondack woods-the story chronicles the creepy circumstances surrounding the girl's assumed murder. Was she, as many in the upstate New York town of Carthage suspect, beaten to death and dumped in the Black River by her older sister's ex-fiance, Brett Kincaid, a decorated Iraqi War vet? Or did she, the "dark twisty" daughter prone to excessive self-loathing, play some perverse role in her own disappearance? What transports the story beyond a carefully crafted whodunit is Oates's dogged exploration of each character's culpability in the case, which spans nearly seven years. Between Kincaid's noncoerced but PTSD-fueled confession and Cressida's feelings that her family didn't understand or love her enough (the source of her long-suppressed desire to escape from them), nearly everyone can somehow be held responsible for the supposed crime-and seen as its unintended victim. When the truth and its fallout finally becomes clear at the end, the mood is not surprisingly claustrophobic and grim. Once again, Oates's gift for exposing the frailty-and selfishness-of humans is on display. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Multiaward winner Oates's latest work focuses on the disappearance and apparent murder of a talented but socially isolated 19-year-old by her sister's ex-fiance. The multiple points of view allow us inside the minds of the shattered Iraqi war veteran accused of the crime, the deceased young woman's shocked and grieving family, and the young woman herself. In some ways, all are victims of wartime atrocities. Each perspective is involving; each character is complex and sympathetic. The result is a narrative that demands continual reevaluation of individuals and events, and readers are likely to race through the pages to unravel the mystery of what happened and why. The unexpected conclusion is very satisfying reading. This is a story about war, violence, mental illness, love, hatred, and, perhaps most of all, the will to survive and the healing power of forgiveness, all powerfully rendered by a master storyteller. -VERDICT Recommended for fans of family dramas from Oates, such as We Were the Mulvaneys. [See Prepub Alert, 8/5/13.]-Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Dark events in Carthage, a town in upstate New York--a war hero returning from Iraq, a broken engagement, a mysterious murder--but not everything is as it seems. Carthage seems to embody the values of small-town America, for its citizens are independent and patriotic, but in early July 2005, things start to go dreadfully wrong. Juliet Mayfield, older daughter of former Carthage mayor Zeno Mayfield, is planning her wedding but finds her fiance, Brett Kincaid, broken and strangely different when he returns from duty in Iraq. Cpl. Kincaid is on a passel of meds, walks with a limp and has obviously experienced a severe trauma while on active duty. Meanwhile, Juliet's cynical and smart-mouthed younger sister, Cressida (the "smart one" as opposed to Juliet, the "beautiful one"), disappears one Saturday night after uncharacteristically visiting a local bar. The next day, Kincaid appears, hung over and largely inarticulate, and blood is found on the seat of his Jeep. Although his mother defiantly defends him as a war hero, Kincaid eventually confesses to having murdered Cressida. The scene then shifts to Florida, seven years later, when an eccentric psychologist is interviewing Sabbath Mae McSwain for an intern position. She's defensive about a name that seems obviously made up, though she carries a birth certificate around with her, and becomes visibly nervous when the psychologist starts probing about her past. The psychologist has been writing a series of exposs entitled SHAME! and is currently working to expose conditions on death row. The novel then shifts once again, this time back to the past, to reveal how Cressida transformed into Sabbath, what horrors Kincaid experienced in Iraq and how Cressida got entangled with Kincaid on his return home. Knotted, tense, digressive and brilliant.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
