The Falls: A Novel - Vendido!

by Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco, September 2004; 496 pages

Rights sold:
*** Brasil: Editora Globo ***
* UK rights sold: Fourth Estate
* Finnish rights sold: Otava
* French rights sold: Editions Philipp Rey
* German rights sold: Fisher
* Greek rights sold: Metaihmio
* Hebrew rights sold: Hakkibutz
* Italian rights sold: Mondadori
* Latvian rights sold: Zvaigzne ABC
* Norwegian rights sold: Pax
* Polish rights sold: Rebis
* Spanish rights sold: Lumen
* Swedish rights sold: Bonniers
* Turkish rights sold: Alfa Basim Yayin

*** The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates has been longlisted to receive The Orange
Prize for Fiction. The Orange Prize is given annually to the best novel
written by a woman and published in the UK. *** 26/03/2005
http://www.orangeprize.co.uk/press/press_rel05/longlist.html

Book Description
A stunning, major achievement from Joyce Carol Oates, "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation). A haunting story of the powerful spell Niagara Falls casts upon two generations of a family, leading to tragedy, love, loss, and, ultimately, redemption.
A man climbs over the railings and plunges into Niagara Falls. A newlywed, he has left behind his wife, Ariah Erskine, in the honeymoon suite the morning after their wedding. "The Widow Bride of The Falls," as Ariah comes to be known, begins a relentless, seven-day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found. At her side throughout, confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby is unexpectedly transfixed by the strange, otherworldly gaze of this plain, strange woman, falling in love with her though they barely exchange a word. What follows is their passionate love affair, marriage, and children -- a seemingly perfect existence.
But the tragedy by which their life together began shadows them, damaging their idyll with distrust, greed, and even murder. What unfurls is a drama of parents and their children; of secrets and sins; of lawsuits, murder, and, eventually, redemption. As Ariah’s children learn that their past is enmeshed with a hushed-up scandal involving radioactive waste, they must confront not only their personal history but America’s murky past: the despoiling of the landscape, and the corruption and greed of the massive industrial expansion of the 1950s and 1960s.
Set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls, Joyce Carol Oates explores the American family in crisis, but also America itself in the mid-twentieth century. As in We Were the Mulvaneys, a "darkly engrossing novel" (Washington Post Book World), she examines what happens when the richly interwoven relationships of parents and their children are challenged by circumstances outside the family.
The Falls is a love story gone wrong and righted, and it alone places Joyce Carol Oates definitively in the company of the great American novelists.


Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award. 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. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature and the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.


A highlight is the CRITIC’S CHOICE review which appears in the October 10th issue of People Magazine. The review gets four stars - the highest rating. An excerpt:

"From its thunderous opening, Oates’s 48th novel is as mesmerizing and turbulent as its Niagara Falls locale... Long known for her gothic inclinations, Oates continues her unflinching look a the dark side. But she also infuses the narrative with unexpected subtlety. When the adult Burnaby children uncover corrosive family secrets 15 years later, this immensely satisfying novel doesn’t deny them the hope of redemption."

The reviewers of THE FALLS are almost as prolific as the author herself - the reviews are coming in nonstop, and they are unanimous in their praise: Joyce Carol Oates has written one of her best novels EVER!!

The Falls- by Joyce Carol Oates
Entertainment Weekly: September 17, 2004
Lead Review:
"With prose as light and eerie as the flutter of piano keys, Oates’ new novel is a dazzingly ambitious tale spanning three decades... Bumpy, dense, topical and deeply affecting, The Falls is that rare family saga with both a kind heart and an ugly gut. Credit the fascinating woman at its core. Oates, a writer who has conceived some of the most intriguing, disturbing female characters of the past half century, has forged in Ariah a creature of steel-- nicked, twisted but somehow lovely. "

New York Times Book Review: September 19, 2004
Cover Review
"Ambitious new novel"
Washington Post Book World: September 12, 2004
"With inimitable virtuosity, Oates weaves the still potent lore of Niagara into her extensive narrative. Using imagery of the river and falls as a driving force, she creates a seamless and engrossing flow that in the end seems natural, inevitable. Once you reach the dread stretch of whitewater rapids in the Niagara River called the Deadline, there is no turning back-- you are committed to going over the Falls. At this point, Oates writes, " You realize that the speed, the propulsion, has nothing to do with you. It is something happening to you. " Such is the experience of reading the latest from this bountiful, endlessly curious and increasingly masterful writer."

The Providence Journal: September 12, 2004

"This riveting and readable novel is one of Oates’ best and lingers in
the mind as a nightmare you cannot shake off."

The Christian Science Monitor: September 14, 2004

"Ariah excites the same perverse fascination as Amanda Wingfield in "The Glass Menagerie.""

"...by the end this is a novel of forgiveness, of learning to accept what’s oddest and cruelest about those we love. It’s a scary, perceptive portrayal of family life, particularly the burdens parents force on their children and the way love can make those burdens, if not light, then at least bearable.

The Los Angeles Times: September 13, 2004

"’The Falls’ ... has the tension of suspense fiction and the melodrama of a gothic novel, but it’s coupled with psychological insight and astute social commentary, proving that Oates, in her best work, continues to defy categorization."

"It is the fluid rhythms and the precision of poetry that lift "The Falls" far beyond its traditional framework. Oates sustains the heightened lyricism and the semi-mystical tone of the opening chapter for almost 500 pages in a frenzied, shaman-like attempt to hypnotize and seduce the reader -- just as the fictive citizens in the novel fall under the spell of Niagara Falls’ roaring water."

"Oates once said of her 1969 novel, "them," the first book to bring her fame as a novelist, that she was attempting to distill "the essence of a place and a time. That magical conjunction of one’s self and the larger, communal, mystical, and unknowable soul." These words also accurately describe "The Falls," surely one of Oates’ best works, a "magical
conjunction" of all her literary experimentation."

The Miami Herald: September 12, 2004
"It’s an expressionistic flood pinning a troubled family to a troubled place and one of the author’s richest pastiches in years. Oates overlays psychological realism and historical fiction with heaving Gothic sensation to imprint that old family favorite: a love that poisons but never dies."

"Oates’ immersion in the psychology of her characters is intrepid, compelling and gloriously full. She has a 19th Century Jamesian generosity in description, allowing readers to physically see and emotionally feel a fictional human on the page."


The Boston Herald wrote last Sunday: "Powerful, darkly engaging.... Written in a lush, contemporary gothic manner with a whiff of the supernatural, ``The Falls’’ marries domestic melodrama to environmental issues, resulting in one of Oates’ most satisfying novels since her 1996 Oprah-list hits ``We Were the Mulvaneys.’’


"Literary star Joyce Carol Oates is back with a dark family saga and love story set at that ultimate romantic destination: Niagara Falls." - from HARPER’S BAZAAR, under their column, THIS FALL’S MUST-READS

"Even a reader who resists Joyce Carol Oates’s gothic sensibilities can marvel at her latest novel, The Falls...her torrential prose is a force of nature." - O Magazine

"The Falls is her best novel since We Were the Mulvaneys... Powerful, compassionate, and ruefully humorous, The Falls is another example of Oates’s inexhaustible brilliance." Review & Interview- BookPage: September, 2004


More great news for THE FALLS: it is featured in the September issue of Elle Magazine, in their "MUST READ" column:
"The book begins with a suicide, has a murderous middle, and ends with a memorial service - yet it’s not depressing. Ariah Littrell Burnaby is a character you follow and feel for, a preacher’s daughter from a small New York town whose choices and demeanor affect the outcome of her children’s - and her husbands’ lives. The setting is Niagara Falls and all the legends surrounding them -- the spirits, the suicides, the stunts. Their natural beauty and lore form the perfect backdrop for Oates’ work."

It’s one starred review after another for THE FALLS. The following STARRED review appears in this week’s issue of Publishers Weekly:
The Falls
Oates, Joyce Carol

Oates is not only on her authentically rendered home ground in this sprawling novel set in the city of Niagara Falls during the 1950s, she is also writing at the top of her form. Her febrile prose is especially appropriate to a story as turbulent as the tumultuous waters that have claimed many lives over the years. Widowed on her wedding night when her new husband, a young minister and latent homosexual, throws himself into the falls, Ariah Littrell, the plain, awkward daughter of a minister, henceforth considers herself damned. Her bleak future becomes miraculously bright when Dirk Burnaby, a handsome, wealthy bon vivant with an altruistic heart, falls in love with the media-dubbed Widow-Bride. Their rapturous happiness is shadowed only by Ariah’s illogical conviction over the years that Dirk will leave her and their three children someday. Her unreasonable fear becomes self-fulfilling when her increasingly unstable behavior, combined with Dirk’s obsessed but chaste involvement with Nina Olshaker, a young mother who enlists his help in alerting the city fathers to the pestilential conditions in the area later to be known as Love Canal, opens a chasm in their marriage. His gentle heart inspired by a need for justice, Dirk takes on the powerful, corrupt politicians, his former peers and pals, in a disastrous lawsuit that ruins him socially and financially and results in his death. Oates adroitly addresses the material of this "first" class action lawsuit and makes the story fresh and immediate. "In the end, all drama is about family," a character muses, and while the narrative occasionally lapses into melodrama in elucidating this theme, Oates spins a haunting story in which nature and humans are equally rapacious and self-destructive.

More great news for Joyce Carol Oates. Kirkus weighs in with a STARRED review, calling it a "masterpiece":

"This big, enthralling novel recaptures the gift for Dreiserian realism that distinguishes such Oates triumphs as them, What I Lived For, and We Were the Mulvaneys. It’s her best ever-and a masterpiece."
THE FALLS
Starred Review in Kirkus Reviews June 15, 2004

Oates (I Am No One You Know, 2003, etc.) painstakingly examines the impulse toward self-destruction-and the ways we find to heal ourselves. The story spans nearly 30 years, beginning in 1950 when newlywed Gilbert Erskine leaps into Niagara Falls to his death, forever traumatizing his bride Ariah, a "spinster" music teacher who had awkwardly stumbled into a marriage neither spouse wanted. The hallucinatory opening section traces Ariah’s growing embitterment while introducing young attorney Dirk Burnaby, who impulsively comforts "the Widow-Bride of The Falls," just as impulsively proposes a year after Gilbert’s demise-and is accepted. The Burnabys settle in Niagara Falls, produce three children, and keep their often volatile marriage together (despite Ariah’s emotional instability and paranoia) until Dirk, moved by the passionate activism of a woman whose family is victimized by environmental poisoning, undertakes the first (1962) lawsuit against the chemical company that had dumped pollutants into Love Canal. The suit is dismissed, Dirk’s high standing in the community is destroyed, and his suspicious death pushes Ariah deeper into withdrawal and resentment. The narrative then focuses in turns on her children. Scholarly, introverted Chandler, who has long known he is his mother’s firstborn but not her favorite, becomes a science teacher, and eventually the dogged pursuer of the buried facts about his father’s obsession and fate. "Golden Boy" Royall struggles to escape the burdens of being loved too easily and achieving too little. And their sister Juliet, who inherits Ariah’s musical gifts, must resist a deathward momentum given stunning metaphoric form in the Burnaby family story of a daredevil tightrope walker, and the beckoning "voices" that seem to speak from within the roaring waters of the Falls.
This big, enthralling novel recaptures the gift for Dreiserian realism that distinguishes such Oates triumphs as them, What I Lived For, and We Were the Mulvaneys. It’s her best ever-and a masterpiece.

Library Journal May 15, 2004
Joyce Carol Oates, The Falls
The author of more than 30 books, Oates returns to her We Were the Mulvaneys theme of a family torn apart by external events. When Ariah’s new husband, Erskine, throws himself into Niagara Falls on the first day of their honeymoon, she endures a seven-day vigil as she awaits the recovery of his body and soon becomes known as the Widow Bride of the Falls. Enter Dirk Burnaby, a local playboy lawyer, who falls in love with Ariah and marries her a month later. Their life goes well, with the birth of two sons and a daughter, but when Dirk takes on what would later be known as the Love Canal lawsuit, his long hours, the rumor of an affair, and the animosity of the community lead to estrangement from his family and then his death. Sixteen years later, we meet Ariah’s children, who know nothing of Ariah’s past as the Widow Bride; they have known only that the community has ridiculed them inexplicably. Through the discovery of their complicated history, all three children find direction. Oates uses the falls metaphor to powerful effect, dramatizing how our lives can get swept up by forces beyond our control. Highly recommended.

I am pleased to share with you the text of DANIEL HALPERN’s letter to US Booksellers regarding THE FALLS by Joyce Carol Oates:
April 28, 2004

Dear Booksellers,
I’ve been reading Joyce Carol Oates since she sent me a story for Antaeus, the literary magazine I used to edit. That would have been the summer of 1970 and I was in Florence, Italy, visiting my mother when the story arrived, an excerpt from her novel Wonderland. If I’m not mistaken, it was a story about an overweight boy who happens to be an idiot savant in the field of mathematics. What you’d expect from Joyce. I soon began reading JCO with growing fascination, not because of the quantity of work, but rather the consistently high level this author achieved book after book -- the variety and intensity and accomplishment of both her fiction and her non-fiction. And then I started publishing her at Ecco; first her smaller books, novellas, story collections, plays, a reprint of her much-respected book On Boxing, etc. And when I moved Ecco to HarperCollins, I became her primary publisher, editing all her major books, starting off with Blonde. I was traveling when that manuscript arrived, and given the weight of its 1,400 pages, I decided to send myself 300-page chunks to work on in the various cities along the way. Last fall her agent sent me The Falls, a novel set in Oates territory, upstate New York. It is a world she has mined more vividly and passionately than any other writer. And she has done it numerous times -- You Must Remember This, one of my favorite Oates novels, is placed there. But The Falls, in my opinion, is Joyce’s most powerful and luminous book to date. It has everything that a great novel needs to have: love, violence, intrigue, history, politics, tension, corruption, redemption -- style, pace, and prose with a surface like polished chrome. I am very proud to be Joyce’s publisher and friend -- and even prouder to be sharing this amazing novel with you. Thanks for helping to get it into the right hands.
Regards,
Daniel Halpern
Senior Vice President, Editorial Director
Ecco
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers