Review by New York Times Review
INCREASINGLY I WONDER whether Joyce Carol Oates is attempting to become Margaret Atwood. Her 40-odd novels, traced over the past 50-odd years, mark an increasing tendency toward dystopia. She is most famous for what one might call novels of small-scale violence, in which individuals might get bloodied (or kidnapped, or sacrificially killed, or implicated in a murder-suicide) but societies usually get off scot-free. Now she has written a thriller in which the murder victim is America. The violence of Oates's world is excessive, but then again it looks much like our own. Like other prolific authors, Oates has always plucked characters and plot-points from the real world: Jeffrey Dahmer, JonBenet Ramsey, Marilyn Monroe. Oates has a tendency to broadcast the threats that are fashionable, not necessarily the ones most likely to befall us. She makes distorted photocopies of the American psyche: biker gangs, psychotic mothers, amnesiacs, cults, sexual abuse, race riots, serial killers, strippers who are also serial killers. So if the country in "Hazards of Time Travel" looks a lot like Gilead, that may be the fault of America and not Atwood. The novel opens with a self-explicating monologue. "Sometimes on my knees in a posture of prayer I am able to break through the 'censor barrier' - to remember," the protagonist, Adriane, begins. "But my brain hurts so!" Adriane calls herself an Exile, as quickly explained immediately after: The Exiled Individual (El) is limited by the Homeland Security Exile Disciplinary Bureau to a 10-mile radius around an assigned residence. A flood of definitions follows. We are told that Mexico and Canada have been "reconstituted," the United States Constitution replaced by "Patriot Vigilance." Oates has always said that her primary interest is in personality. A writer like Atwood takes great joy in world-building, but for Oates it's a chore to be dispensed with. And so the Cliffs Notes-like introduction is a frantic scrabble to get back into charted territory. We meet Adriane's humble father, forced out of his medical residency for "listening sympathetically" to a political speech; her weasly brother, Roderick, stuck in a menial job at the Media Dissemination Bureau (MDB); and Adriane herself, first selected valedictorian and then arrested before graduation. "How ironic it was," Adriane exclaims. "I'd been, for those few cruel days, valedictorian of my high school class!" After the arrest, she is sent back in time, renamed Mary Ellen and exiled to a college "in the North-Midwest States that now encompass what was known as 'Wisconsin.'" It's the late 1950s; the other girls at Wainscotia State are aghast that Adriane doesn't wear rollers in her hair at night. And she is terrified by their girdles and cigarettes. "Is this my punishment?" Adriane wonders. "Secondary smoke inhalation." Oh, the hazards of time travel! The novel's underdescribed future, with its hints at totalitarian politics, doesn't play to Oates's strengths as a nostalgia artist, her ability to abruptly evoke a bygone era with a teenager's pink plastic hairbrush, a mother's black net gloves. At her best, her worlds, however violent, feel lovingly considered. The futuristic one in "Hazards of Time Travel" feels hastily made. Wisconsin in the 1950s gives Oates more to work with: a tartan skirt pinned with a bronze clip, a bomb shelter filled with Rice Krispies and fruit cocktail. These objects are carefully chosen. They have more psychological nuance than Oates's people. Adriane and her classmates all share the same earnest, shuttered quality and indistinguishable voice. More fundamentally, they're all manifestations of Joyce Carol Oates: excitable Victorians, fascinated by conformity and fear. Adriane attends classes taught by a B. E Skinner collaborator interested in "curing antisocial behavior," and falls in love with his assistant, who she suspects is an El himself. "But how ironic," Adriane exclaims, "an Exiled Individual recruited to cure antisocial behavior!" "If this novel ... had been published before 2016," Oates tweeted in January, it "would seem like dystopian future/sci-fi." But the world she imagines is rigorously believable, its every twist underlined and circled. Oates evokes a future made from the ingredients of the present: televisions and internet access, cellphones and broken government. She doesn't try to stretch the limits of what we know, or what we might become. That's a task for an Atwood, perhaps. JAMIE FISHER has recently completed a novel set in postwar Italy.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Adriane knows that it's risky to reveal that one thinks for one's self, yet, as high-school valedictorian, she cannot play it safe and is promptly arrested for her inquisitive graduation speech. Deemed an Exiled Individual, which is slightly better than a Deleted Individual, she is sent to Zone 9 and shackled to a new identity and tyrannical rules. Traumatized and bewildered, she struggles to survive as Mary Ellen, a freshman at a Wisconsin college where the library is filled with actual books and phones are enormous and stationary. Yes, Adriane has been exiled to the past, to 1959, 80 years back. Adriane/Mary Ellen is nearly paralyzed with fear, until she becomes convinced that a young, attractive psychology professor is a fellow Exile. Within a tautly suspenseful, wryly incisive tale of a daring truth-seeker and forbidden love, of the dawn of behavioral psychology and the weaponizing of virtual realities, Oates probes the diabolical, shape-shifting nature of authoritarianism and the timeless valor of dissent. While in this clever, brain-twisting, Poe-like fable she looks to the past and the future to dramatize the vulnerability of the psyche, the fragility of freedom, and the catastrophic consequences of repressing intelligence, independence, and creativity, what Oates illuminates is the present. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Oates is always provocative, but this tensile dystopian tale will magnetize readers in a whole new mode.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Oates's eerie dystopian novel (following Beautiful Days) is set both in New Jersey circa 2039 and in Wisconsin in 1959. In 2039, 17-year-old Adriane Strohl, who narrates, is to be her graduating class's valedictorian. Doing well in school is encouraged, but doing too well can get you noticed by the authorities in the "True Democracy" of the North American States (NAS), where equality is nominally espoused though not truly enacted (people of color and women are given decidedly short shrift). After Adriane's outspoken commencement speech, she's arrested by Homeland Security for treason and ultimately cast out of modern society and teleported to 1959 Wisconsin, where she's to attend Wainscotia State University as Mary Ellen Enright and be reeducated in the hope that she can eventually return to her own time. She's told she will be under constant surveillance and must never reveal her true identity. There, she becomes convinced that her psychology instructor, Dr. Ira Wolfman, is a fellow exile. As she falls for Wolfman, she begins to question everything about the restrictive world she left. Oates weaves a feeling of constant menace and paranoia throughout as Adriane struggles to remember her old life and adjust to her new one. The conclusion is surprising and ambiguous, leaving readers to question their own perception of events, making for a memorable novel. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In a dystopian United States after 9/11, Adriane Strohl is named valedictorian of her high school class. Before she can deliver her valedictory address, she's arrested for treason, having asked questions rather than staying within approved limits for her speech. Because Adriane is only 17, she's exiled-transported-to a college in Wainscotia, WI-in the 1950s. She's given a new name, and a chip is implanted in her brain to prevent her from disclosing information from the future, to muddle her memory of her previous life, and to keep her under surveillance. Adriane struggles to understand what has happened to her, abide by the rules for exiles, and gain something from her college experience. When she discovers that her psychology professor is also an exile, they form a bond, but then he suggests they escape to California, with devastating results. Multi-award-winning author Oates creates a world in which cherished American freedoms have disappeared and technology has risen to include time travel. And in the end, the will to survive outweighs the search for truth. VERDICT Readers of dystopian fiction will enjoy wrapping their minds around this story. [See Prepub Alert, 5/14/18.]-Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence © Copyright 2018. 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
A defiant young woman in near-future America is sentenced to hard time in the 1950s Midwest.Oates (A Book of American Martyrs, 2017, etc.) needn't mention Donald Trump to make the target of this dark allegory clear. The United States has become a repressive regime that's run by oligarchs, ranks its citizenry by skin tone, and "vaporizes" dissenters. The narrator, Adriane, is set to graduate high school as valedictorian until it's discovered that her speech is filled with impertinent questions. (Like, say, Why does America fight so many wars?) Found guilty of "Treason and Questioning of Authority," Adriane is sentenced to a re-education camp: a women's college in central Wisconsin in 1959, eight decades in the past. (The nature of time-travel technology is initially vague, which makes for a potent late plot twist.) Given a new identity, Adriane is expected to be an Eisenhower-era good girl and not make a fuss. "I would be the ideal studentthe ideal coed,' " she writes. "I would never betray or even feel the mildest curiosity." As in any good prison-break story, though, her compliance doesn't last long: She finds common cause with a psychology professor who she suspects has been similarly exiled. Oates takes some pleasure in imagining Adriane's culture shock: women fussing over their hair, bafflement about books on paper. But the overall mood is somber, stressing the point that the era those MAGA hats suggest was so great was often oppressive and mean-spirited, particularly toward women. Oates dwells much, sometimes ponderously so, on B.F. Skinner's then-popular concept of behaviorism, which slotted humans as dim machines lacking in free will. And Oates' late style, thick with em dashes and exclamatory prose, flirts with melodrama. But forgivably so: Are we not living in emotionally demanding times?More shambling than dystopian classics by Orwell, Atwood, and Ishiguro but energized by a similar spirit of outrage. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
