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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Naval Langa Lucid prose To start a novel with a disaster is a novelty that is fading its shine perhaps. But the licidity of the prose the author, Joyce Carol Oates has poured onto the pages is wonderful. Its a page turning one.
Rated of 5
by Coventry
A good book overall. The detail went on and on at times and I found myself skipping over it. This story covers a long period of time, so it is a little long. This is the first book I have read by this author, and I would probably read another.
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.
Bridge of Sighs courses with small-town rhythms and the claims of family. Here is a town, as well as a world, defined by magnificent and nearly devastating contradictions.
From a fiercely funny Danish John Irving, a bighearted, epic story of mad dogs, naughty boys, strange relatives, and family secrets.
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Terrence Rafferty
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