Joyce Carol Oates is a writer who I go back to all the time, and her work rarely disappoints. I loved Foxfire even though it felt like Oates had no idea how to end it, Solstice felt surreally beautiful in ways that still unsettle me, and We Were the Mulvaneys I almost felt as if I read on a dare, looking for flaws rather than joy. This list feels like a greatest hits collection instead of something more representative, but she publishes so, so much…
So, I picked up The Accursed (if you can pick something up electronically), having not read of any of her work for a long time. It worked for me, even though it was way too long (the last chapter is an all-caps ‘recreation’ of the sermon Slade is giving while he’s dying), slipped in and out of scientific laws several times, and felt like it was either a romance or a horror story or a gothic romance or a Henry Jamesian ghost story or something. The narrative bounces back and forth between the rich, ancient (for the U.S.) families of Princeton, New Jersey (which includes Woodrow Wilson, although he’s sort of nouveau riche), and Upton Sinclair. She takes advantage of the fact that all of these folks lived near each other in the aughts, and weaves a strange story that goes between supernatural and something sunk down into material reality.
The key metaphor in the novel (or is it more a trope?) is blindness. The families of Princeton think that the curse is caused by an indiscretion of Winslow Slade’s as a young man – even the historian-narrator thinks something like that (or blames it on the sort of mass hysteria that is common in the 19th c. pseudo-science that passes for psychology), because they think that they’re godly folk. Instead, I think that Oates alludes to the source of the curse when she starts the novel with a lynching that none of the muckety-mucks seem to care about, and then uses Upton Sinclair’s story as a way to talk about fighting the good fight, against racism and capitalism. The novel seems haunted less by supernatural forces than it does by the type of naturalized prejudice against the poor and non-white that haunts the early 20th century.