The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates

Oates' work has a sentimentality and melodrama that is more characteristic of an earlier style of fiction, of Dreiser or even Hardy. And if that indeed is your aim, The Gravedigger's Daughter will not disappoint. Oates hits all the stops here: coming of age, anti-Semitism, tortured love, grisly scenes of domestic violence, a murder mystery and, of course, the Oatesian twist ending.

But we'll get to that in a bit.

The Gravedigger's Daughter is the story of Rebecca Schwart, daughter of Jacob and Anna Schwart, German-Jewish refugees from Hitler who fled to America in 1936. Jacob can only find work as a gravedigger and the family takes up residence in a cottage in the Chatauqua Falls, New York cemetery. In bitter irony, they are persecuted by their neighbors, who think they are Nazis, and Jacob loses his mind to the demons of his past. He eventually shoots himself and his wife in front of Rebecca.

Rebecca later marries an abusive man and must flee him with their young son, starting a long string of "keeping-going." It's at this point, about half way through the novel, that Oates seems to lose control. Her writing appears rushed, she repeatedly uses "that" when she means "which," and she introduces too many new characters with the promise of developing them further, only to drop them almost immediately thereafter. This may be an effort to show, through style, that Rebecca's life has also become rushed and harried, but the real effect is that of sloppiness and self-indulgence, clashing with the book's motif: "In animal life the weak are quickly disposed of. So you must hide your weakness."

Oates also fails to develop her secondary characters to any satisfying degree. This was true of Black Girl/White Girl, too. It's like seeing the world with someone else's thumb over your camera lens.

And her exploration of a Jewish girl's search for identity seems trite and heavy-handed. As Siegel puts it, "Oates has discovered the Holocaust, and she labors mightily to incorporate it into her distinctive vision." It's easy, living in New York City in the 21st century, to almost forget that anti-Semitism exists. But it did and still does very much in some places, as my mom found out when she showed up to her first year of college at SUNY Buffalo in 1963 and a girl knocked on her door to "see what one looked like." And yet nowhere, except in Oates' world, could a woman be called a "dirty Jew" after every bad thing that happens to her. Oates couldn't have treated her subject with less subtlety than if she had painted a big gold star on her back.

That's overall: no subtlety. Oates is incredibly prolific, which is understandable because it doesn't seem like she works very hard at crafting her novels, or even gives them the once-over. She's hit or miss, so take your chances.