THE GRAVEDIGGER'S DAUGHTER
Joyce Carol Oates
Harper Perennial
Fiction
Hardcover: 0061236829
Paperback: 9780061236839

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If Joyce Carol Oates wrote a different kind of fiction, her legendary prolificacy would hardly be worth remarking. If she wrote romances or murder mysteries, for example, "churning out" a book a year would be par for the course. Oates, however, continually impresses readers, critics and other writers alike by consistently producing compelling, challenging fiction with only rare missteps. With THE GRAVEDIGGER'S DAUGHTER, Oates continues this strong tradition as she tells the uniquely American story of one woman's self-discovery against the background of post-World War II America.

The novel begins with a misunderstanding --- Rebecca Tignor, a young wife and mother, has been mistaken by a stranger for Hazel Jones, a person whom she doesn't know at all. Followed by the intense, oddly compelling man, Rebecca hurries home from her factory job. In her fear, Rebecca's mother's mistrust of strangers comes back to haunt her now-grown daughter, and the narrative soon shifts back to Rebecca's troubled childhood.

Rebecca is the youngest child and only daughter of Jacob and Anna Schwart. Jacob, a former schoolteacher, has been hired as the local gravedigger and cemetery caretaker for a small town in upstate New York. The family, which has fled Nazi Germany, hopes that their time in the rundown caretaker's cottage will be limited; but as budgets, family stresses and crises mount up, they settle in for good. Jacob Schwart, a taciturn, scheming man, despises townspeople who mock the Schwarts as Jews and resents his daughter, the only one of the family to be born in the United States. Anna Schwart, who refuses to learn English and becomes an embarrassment to her children, grows increasingly suspicious of her surroundings.

In the wake of the tragedy that follows the stressed family's breaking point, Rebecca has her first chance to start her life over, an opportunity that she seizes once more when her marriage dissolves, again in a scene of horrific violence and terror. This time, Rebecca seizes on the name of that mysterious "Hazel Jones," recreating herself into a new woman without a past to haunt or harm her.

THE GRAVEDIGGER'S DAUGHTER is a sprawling, challenging portrait of a life that seems entirely plausible, even in its violence and sadness. Oates's Rebecca is coarse, crude and at times maddeningly self-deluding, with a tendency to avoid self-reflection or self-examination, especially when doing so might mean confronting hard truths.

Some might grow frustrated by Oates's patent refusal to offer clear answers about Rebecca's origins and characters. Instead, the novel forces readers to reach their own conclusions about this woman whom they will come, in so many ways, to know intimately, but who remains fundamentally impossible to understand, even to herself. The novel's abrupt, ambiguous ending offers the (unwritten) possibility of reconciling the past and the future, but the story that unfolds in the book eschews uplifting inspiration for a grittier kind of redemption.

   --- Reviewed by Norah Piehl






















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