Joyce Carol Oates's Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans.
In A Garden of Earthly Delights, Oates presents one of her most memorable heroines, Clara Walpole, the beautiful daughter of Kentucky-born migrant farmworkers. Desperate to rise above her haphazard existence of violence and poverty, determined not to repeat her mother's life, Clara struggles for independence by way of her relationships with four very different men: her father, a family man turned itinerant labourer, smouldering with resentment; the mysterious Lowry, who rescues Clara as a teenager and offers her the possibility of love; Revere, a wealthy landowner who provides Clara with stability; and Swan, Clara's son, who bears the psychological and spiritual burden of his mother's ambition.
A masterly work from a writer with "the uncanny ability to give us a cinemascopic vision of her America" ( National Review), A Garden of Earthly Delights is the opening stanza in what would become one of the most powerful and engrossing story arcs in literature.
A Garden of Earthly Delights is the first novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, Expensive People, them, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.
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Arkansas: On that day many years ago a rattling Ford truck carrying twenty-nine farmworkers and their children sideswiped a local truck carrying hogs to Little Rock on a rain-slick country highway. CARLETON, 1
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(@ModernLibrary, 22 April 2003, first published 1967, 406 pages, paperback, copy from @AmazonUK, #reread)
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I've run out of print books to read except for the books I've ordered so I'm going to do a bunch of rereads, first of which is JCO's Wonderland quartet. I haven't read them together and I read them the first time a few years ago. I enjoyed this a little bit more the second time around and gave it a higher rating. This is a well written book, an impressive study in characterisation and society. The characters are the focus here and the book is split into three large sections which focus on Clara's relationships with three men, her father, a migrant farm worker, Lowery, an older man who becomes her lover and saves her from following her parents into poverty and her son, Swan who does a terrible thing that destroys her life and sanity. This is an incredibly sad book at times as Clara struggles with the life thrust upon her by her poverty-stricken migrant worker parents. She is seen and treated like dirt for the most part and becomes obsessed with having a better life for herself. Who can blame her? Clara is devoted to Swan, her boy which makes the tragic events at the end even more heart-breaking. Up next is Expensive People.