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Summary and Reviews of The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates

The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates

The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates
  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • First Published:
  • Sep 1, 2004, 400 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 2005, 512 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

'This big, enthralling novel recaptures the gift for Dreiserian realism that distinguishes such Oates triumphs as What I Lived For, and We Were the Mulvaneys. It's her best ever, and a masterpiece.' Kirkus Reviews.

A stunning, major achievement from Joyce Carol Oates, "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation). A haunting story of the powerful spell Niagara Falls casts upon two generations of a family, leading to tragedy, love, loss, and, ultimately, redemption.  A man climbs over the railings and plunges into Niagara Falls. A newlywed, he has left behind his wife, Ariah Erskine, in the honeymoon suite the morning after their wedding. "The Widow Bride of The Falls," as Ariah comes to be known, begins a relentless, seven-day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found. At her side throughout, confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby is unexpectedly transfixed by the strange, otherworldly gaze of this plain, strange woman, falling in love with her though they barely exchange a word. What follows is their passionate love affair, marriage, and children -- a seemingly perfect existence.

But the tragedy by which their life together began shadows them, damaging their idyll with distrust, greed, and even murder. What unfurls is a drama of parents and their children; of secrets and sins; of lawsuits, murder, and, eventually, redemption. As Ariah's children learn that their past is enmeshed with a hushed-up scandal involving radioactive waste, they must confront not only their personal history but America's murky past: the despoiling of the landscape, and the corruption and greed of the massive industrial expansion of the 1950s and 1960s.

Set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls, Joyce Carol Oates explores the American family in crisis, but also America itself in the mid-twentieth century. As in We Were the Mulvaneys, a "darkly engrossing novel" (Washington Post Book World), she examines what happens when the richly interwoven relationships of parents and their children are challenged by circumstances outside the family.

The Falls is a love story gone wrong and righted, and it alone places Joyce Carol Oates definitively in the company of the great American novelists.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

The Washington Post - Jane Ciabattari
In her hypnotic new novel, The Falls, Oates juxtaposes a majestic and dangerous natural phenomenon -- the Falls at Niagara -- with a man-made monstrosity, the deadly witches' brew of nuclear and toxic waste known as Love Canal -- as the threatening elements underlying a family saga of self-destruction and redemption.

Booklist - Joanne Wilkinson
From Oates' fevered imagination comes a sprawling, ambitious novel with enough material to fill several books.... This passionate, compulsively readable novel displays the full range of Oates' singular obsessions--the destructiveness of secrets; eccentric female characters given to rapacious appetites and volatile emotions; and the mysterious way that human emotion is mirrored in the natural world. Vivid and memorable reading from the madly prolific Oates. 

Kirkus Reviews
This big, enthralling novel recaptures the gift for Dreiserian realism that distinguishes such Oates triumphs as What I Lived For, and We Were the Mulvaneys. It's her best ever, and a masterpiece. 

Library Journal - Joshua Cohen
Oates uses the falls metaphor to powerful effect, dramatizing how our lives can get swept up by forces beyond our control. Highly recommended.

Publishers Weekly
In the end, all drama is about family, a character muses, and while the narrative occasionally lapses into melodrama in elucidating this theme, Oates spins a haunting story in which nature and humans are equally rapacious and self-destructive. 

Author Blurb Terrence Rafferty
At her best, as in the middle section of The Falls, she's like a contemporary Dreiser, both in her slovenliness and in her power. After 40 years and millions of words, Joyce Carol Oates remains implacable, unstoppable, and if she isn't truly a force of nature that's only because, as in any long relationship between a writer and her audience, there's not much mystery left.

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Beyond the Book



A number of reviewers compare Oates to Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), an American author whose novels depict real-life subjects in a harsh light and, at the time they were written, were often considered to be amoral.

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Read-Alikes

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