I just finished reading A Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates, who continues to be one of my favorite authors. I'm convinced she is not of this earth. Her ghostly photograph haunts the book jacket with eyes that stare out from another century. And I wonder if she is a creature who sleeps. I don't know if there has ever existed an author so prolific or one so adept at being able to write from the inside of her characters--be it a girl of sixteen or a man in his late sixties who is obsessed by her.
This is not a book review. Although like most of her stories, A Fair Maiden captivated me by the middle of the first page. It's Joyce's magic--her ability to hypnotize us into surrendering to her stories. And it's a willing surrender. Her characters leap off the page. They smile and breathe and moan. We feel their sweat, their chills, their sexuality. We come to know them. They are real, so real in fact because we recognize their thoughts, their perceptions. They are our thoughts, our mothers' thoughts, the boys we were attracted to in high school's thoughts. It's as if each of Joyce's books is personalized to speak to something specific in each one of us. And yet it is the same book we hold in our hands that is read by millions of others. How does she do that?
All these people that speak through Joyce. As if she is a medium, a transmitter of lives that make themselves known through her stories. As if she is the purveyor of souls--from now and before.
In A Fair Maiden, what could so easily be construed as 'sick, perverted, unlawful' is instead something incredibly beautiful. It is a love story, in the mode of a fairytale, a story of old. Where a fair maiden and a beloved king interact in a storybook house to the backdrop of the sea and ocean birds. Where soul mates, art, and love intertwine in the rich fabric of something resembling a dream. And it all happens in New Jersey.
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