Man Crazy: A Novel - Softcover

Oates, Joyce Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452277248 ISBN 13: 9780452277243

Publisher: Plume, 1998

Synopsis

Fresh from the triumph of the bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates continues her exploration of family love and the possibilities of human redemption.

At five, Ingrid Boone loves her father with all the innocence and blind trust of childhood—until he abandons her and her beautiful young mother in the wake of a violent crime. Desperate to recapture his lost love and hungry for any kind of mercy at a man’s hand, Ingrid allows boys and men to abuse her as she searches for affection in the alcohol, drugs, and sex they offer.

When she is targeted as prey by a charismatic leader of a violent cult, Ingrid falls to her blackest moment of despair—yet it is here that she finds unexpected salvation and the will to reclaim her life and heart from the men who have taken it.

About this title

About the Author

In addition to many prize-winning and bestselling novels, including We Were the Mulvaneys, Black Water, Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart, and Broke Heart Blues, Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of works of gothic fiction including Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, a World Fantasy Award nominee; and Zombie, winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel, awarded by the Horror Writers' Association. In 1994, Oates received the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in Horror Fiction. She is the editor of American Gothic Tales. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

From Kirkus Reviews

Oates's 27th novel, following fast on the heels of last year's highly praised We Were the Mulvaneys, revisits the depressed upstate New York environs of her earliest (and perhaps most typical) fiction. It's the first-person story of 21-year-old Ingrid Boone, a small-town girl who has survived her estranged parents' rootlessness and chaotic behavior, a drug- and sex-addicted adolescence, and her captivity as the slavelike ``Dog-girl'' of a violent, messianic biker who rules a cult called ``Satan's Children.'' The narrative proceeds through a succession of dreamlike short scenes that replay Ingrid's sometimes discontinuous (though mainly chronological) memories and fantasies. Ingrid is a generously imagined and vividly realized character: The deprivations and self-hatred that set her on her self-destructive path are rendered with savage clarity, and Oates makes us believe that she's also a bright, sensitive girl who seeks imaginative refuge from her traumatizing circumstances by writing poetry. The characterizations of her mother Chloe, a weak-willed beauty who'll do anything to survive, and her father Luke, a Vietnam fighter pilot who knows he can't escape his violent nature (``I'm shit in the eyes of God''), are equally compelling--as is Oates's presentation of their helpless, mutually destructive love. But the novel has flaws, including occasionally slack writing and careless anachronisms. And in the character of the sexually charismatic cultist Enoch Skaggs, Oates draws another of the unconvincingly feverish caricatures that mar several of her more portentous stories. Nor does it seem necessary to spell out the source of Ingrid's sociopathic downward progression (``Crazy for men they say it's really your own daddy you seek''). Nevertheless, as in Mulvaneys, Oates shows us the paradoxical resilience that sustains people who endure more than we can imagine, and somehow hang on. Her boldly drawn grotesques reach out to us, making us believe in them and care about their fates. (Book- of-the-Month club/Quality Paperback Book Club selections) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0452277248
• ISBN 13: 9780452277243
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288