Man Crazy - Hardcover

Oates, Joyce Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1860494765 ISBN 13: 9781860494765

Publisher: Virago Press (an Imprint of Little, Brown Book Group), 1998

Synopsis

An intense roller-coaster ride into the abyss, MAN CRAZY charts the fall and rise of teenager Ingrid Boone, abandoned by her father, moving from town to town, taking what she can get and always giving too much in return. This is a novel about the horrors waiting at the end of the road for the innocent, but in the end it is about one girl's realisation that men don't make you more real, that pain isn't an integral part of normal life.

About this title

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938. She has written many novels and numerous collections of stories, poetry and plays. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.

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: Virago Press (an Imprint of Little, Brown Book Group)
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1860494765
• ISBN 13: 9781860494765
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1