LITTLE BIRD OF HEAVEN
Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco
Fiction
ISBN: 9780061829833
Like many of Joyce Carol Oates’s novels, LITTLE BIRD OF HEAVEN opens with a ripped-from-the-headlines type of premise only to reach far beyond those kinds of tabloid themes to elevate tawdry subjects to literary heights. In this case, the central event is the brutal 1983 murder of Zoe Kruller, a young wife and mother in the small fictional town of Sparta, New York.
At first, we see Zoe through the young, innocent eyes of Krista Diehl, who knows Zoe primarily as both the vivacious, smiling young woman who serves up ice cream (and flirtation) at the town shop and as the sexy, dynamic lead singer of a popular local band. It turns out, though, that flirtation and sexiness haven’t escaped the attention of Krista’s father Eddy, either. And when Zoe’s body is discovered in a seedy apartment she shares with another woman, Eddy, along with Zoe’s estranged husband Delray, is one of the key suspects.
Over the first half of the novel, Oates circles back to this murder --- and to the events leading up to and following it --- contributing additional details (and Krista’s growing maturity and understanding) to flesh out what happened and why. It turns out that as Zoe’s perky ice cream shop exterior faded and her musical aspirations evaporated, her marriage began to crumble, and she slipped into a world of alcohol, drugs and prostitution. As Krista continually revisits these events through the lens of her own growing understanding, she also becomes increasingly fascinated with Zoe’s son Aaron, a violently unpredictable but strangely alluring boy, whose youthful encounter with Krista ensures that sexuality and violence will be linked eternally in her mind.
Following a tensely pivotal scene between Krista and her father, the narrative shifts focus to Aaron himself. As the lives of these two youths begin to overlap, stories unfold as the adults in their lives gradually fall victim to the despair and violence. This sense of hopelessness that characterizes life in Sparta will have readers wondering whether Krista and Aaron are equally doomed to relive the errors of their parents, or if they will be able to live a life free of failure unlike so many other inhabitants of Sparta.
The narrative, which, especially in the first part of the novel, continually moves forward and backward in time, creates a spiral-like story structure that revisits the same events, each time with new information or perception. This writing style helps to closely echo the feeling of being trapped in a small town like Sparta, a town in which dreams and aspirations are doomed to failure, where there are few choices except for dead-end jobs and drunken stupors, and where young people dream only of escaping. LITTLE BIRD OF HEAVEN combines a gritty, clear-eyed portrayal of a certain kind of small town and its hopeless inhabitants, where anger and fear cohabitate, and violence is never far behind. Sparta is a town that Oates has portrayed before (in THE GRAVEDIGGER’S DAUGHTER and WE WERE THE MULVANEYS), and in this author’s talented hands, these three novels together form a searing emotional portrait of a mythical and painfully realistic small town.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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