Joyce Carol Oates has written another terrible book…a traumatic experience ….which should be required reading for all incipient parents, especially the well-to-do. The damage wreaked on nine-year-old-Skyler Rampike (recall Ramsay?) and his six-year-old sister (wee skating star tarted up and renamed BLISS by her socially insecure publicity grasping mother is unbelievable.
But narrated in the voice of the still teenaged boy struggling to put down memories foggy with prescribed drugs it is all too believable. He captures the Mommy Dearest voice and the hearty self congratulatory voice of the CEO-to-be father as well as the smarmy Jesus-loves-you voice of the arena church preacher and those of psychopharmacologists prescribing drug after drug, TV hosts battening on family trageidies, McMansion-plus peddling realtors and other wonderful figures of our upper class and aspiring middle class social ladder climbing castes.
She nails them and puts their heads up on spikes.: sadistic prep school teachers, frantic trainers of the hapless offspring of would-be-Olympic winners parents, drug-addled children of blue-collar criniinals, murderers (remember a sports hero indited for the murder of his wife and lover?) and others.
Yet the teen aged boy, rumored to have murdered his sister at the age of nine, still manages to make understandable if not sympathetic the terrible adults in this relentlessly gripping murder mystery.
Leave a Reply