Childwold By Joyce Carol Oates
Fawcett Crest Books (Paperback), 1976
287 Pages
BLURB FROM THE COVER
This is the story of an enchantment and its dramatic consequences. At the center 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.
EXTRACT
THAT final year of my life, I often dreamed of Evangeline in her attic room, asleep in her high wind-rocked moon-haunted bed, in that rotting farmhouse on the river; my teeth grinding as hers did, my voice guttural and sleep-stricken. My knuckles bled, I must have been gnawing at them.
REVIEW
This was my first time reading Childwold.
I have to say, I really didn’t get on with it. JCO may be one of my favorite writers but Childwold proves not everything she writes is brilliant. Another favorite writer, Stephen King proved this with his two novels of 2014, Mr Mercedes and Revival which were both stinkers.
The premise of Childwold is very similar to Lolita. I never had an issue with the subject matter. I think Lolita is a good novel even if the subject matter is unpleasant. I was looking forward to seeing how JCO handled a similar premise. As Childwold proves she didn’t handle it very well. The biggest issue is that JCO uses a stream-of-consciousness style in Childwold. One of my least favorite narrative styles. I found Childwold very disjoined and confusing. I struggled to understand what was going on. Did Kesch have sex with Laney? Was it all a weird erotic dream? I really couldn’t follow the narrative thread in Childwold. Stream-of-consciousness was very popular when Childwold was published. I don’t know if JCO was just jumping on the band-wagon or thought this was the only way to write about unpleasant subject matter. Either way, none of Childwold worked for me.
RATING
