Synopses & Reviews
A riveting novel that explores the high price of success in the life of one woman—the first female president of a lauded ivy league institution—and her hold upon her self-identity in the face of personal and professional demons, from Joyce Carol Oates, author of the
New York Times bestseller
A Widows StoryMudgirl is a child abandoned by her mother in the silty flats of the Black Snake River. Cast aside, Mudgirl survives by an accident of fate—or destiny. After her rescue, the well-meaning couple who adopt Mudgirl quarantine her poisonous history behind the barrier of their middle-class values, seemingly sealing it off forever. But the bulwark of the present proves surprisingly vulnerable to the agents of the past.
Meredith “M.R.” Neukirchen is the first woman president of an Ivy League university. Her commitment to her career and moral fervor for her role are all-consuming. Involved with a secret lover whose feelings for her are teasingly undefined, and concerned with the intensifying crisis of the American political climate as the United States edges toward war with Iraq, M.R. is confronted with challenges to her leadership that test her in ways she could not have anticipated. The fierce idealism and intelligence that delivered her from a more conventional life in her upstate New York hometown now threaten to undo her.
A reckless trip upstate thrusts M.R. Neukirchen into an unexpected psychic collision with Mudgirl and the life M.R. believes she has left behind. A powerful exploration of the enduring claims of the past, Mudwoman is at once a psychic ghost story and an intimate portrait of a woman cracking the glass ceiling at enormous personal cost, which explores the tension between childhood and adulthood, the real and the imagined, and the “public” and “private” in the life of a highly complex contemporary woman.
Review
“Extraordinarily intense, racking, and resonant... Masterfully enmeshing nightmare with reality, Oates has created a resolute, incisive, and galvanizing drama about our deep connection to place, the persistence of the past, and the battles of a resilient soul under siege… A major, controversy-ready novel from high-profile, protean Oates.” Booklist (starred review)
Review
“[A] powerful novel…[Oates] deftly interweaves M.R.s present, memories of her troubled childhood, and her feverish hallucinations…This hypnotic novel suggests that forgetting the past may be the heavy cost that success demands.” The New Yorker
Review
“Uniquely personal… an intriguing departure from token Oates tales.” Huffington Post
Review
“Madness and malevolence squirm on almost every page in Joyce Carol Oates 38th novel… Oates dark brilliance is ever evident in her main characters, complex souls with mysterious corners in their psyches…” Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review
“This chilling novel opens with a child left to die in a silty riverbed, a memory that no amount of later life success can erase.” O, the Oprah Magazine
Review
“…The Oates style, with its fractious barrage of dashes, suggests what [Emily] Dickenson might have produced if she had written doorstop novels instead of short poems…[Oates] is especially perceptive in showing the political tightrope that M.R. has to walk in her powerful but fragile position at the university…” Wall Street Journal
Review
“[A] disturbing, psychological thriller.” New York Post
Review
“Oates [displays] the insights into human bonds that make her brilliant....Oates makes [her characters] torment come alive. We grasp her compulsion to return to the mud of the past in order find her true self.” USA Today
Review
“[A] disturbing exploration of selfhood…As always, Joyce Carol Oates masterfully evokes a sense of menace, if not malevolence, while drawing her readers deep into the psychology of her characters… a dark, intelligent and deeply compelling novel... which will hold you in its thrall until the end.” Washington Independent Review of Books
Review
“Theres a freshness to this novel, a sense of some new, more personal beginning. Its bold... to paint achievement... as just the flip side of victimization--and its perhaps even bolder to make such visceral drama from the story of a workaholic who finally confronts life unhooked from a keyboard.” New York Times Book Review
Review
“Oates is an extremely visceral writer…Mudwoman is a genuinely unsettling book in which Oates pays her readers the compliment of never letting them settle or even being entirely sure about what they have just read.” Financial Times
Review
“Mudwoman is very good at the performance of the public life of the woman president…The unraveling of this performance is grippingly horrible.” New York Review of Books
Review
“Joyce Carol Oates latest novel is about many things, but first and foremost it is about the complications of being a high-achieving woman in the 21st century…Oates tells [her protagonists story] with a detail and relish thats both heartbreaking and fascinating.” Ms. magazine
Synopsis
"Oates is just a fearless writer...with her brave heart and her impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers."
--Los Angeles Times
" An] extraordinarily intense, racking, and resonant novel."
--Booklist (starred review)
One of the most acclaimed writers in the world today, the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates follows up her searing, New York Times bestselling memoir, A Widow's Story, with an extraordinary new work of fiction. Mudwoman is a riveting psychological thriller, taut with dark suspense, that explores the high price of repression in the life of a respected university president teetering on the precipice of a nervous breakdown. Like Daphne DuMaurier's gothic masterwork, Rebecca, and the classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, Oates's Mudwoman is a chilling page-turner that hinges on the power of the imagination and the blurry lines between the real and the invented--and it stands tall among the author's most powerful and beloved works, including The Falls, The Gravedigger's Daughter, and We Were the Mulvaneys.
Synopsis
“Oates is just a fearless writer…with her brave heart and her impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“[An] extraordinarily intense, racking, and resonant novel.”
—
Booklist (starred review)
One of the most acclaimed writers in the world today, the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates follows up her searing, New York Times bestselling memoir, A Widows Story, with an extraordinary new work of fiction. Mudwoman is a riveting psychological thriller, taut with dark suspense, that explores the high price of repression in the life of a respected university president teetering on the precipice of a nervous breakdown. Like Daphne DuMauriers gothic masterwork, Rebecca, and the classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, Oatess Mudwoman is a chilling page-turner that hinges on the power of the imagination and the blurry lines between the real and the invented—and it stands tall among the authors most powerful and beloved works, including The Falls, The Gravediggers Daughter, and We Were the Mulvaneys.
About the Author
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Accursed. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.