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The Falls |
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A haunting story of the powerful spell Niagara Falls casts upon two generations of a family, leading to tragedy, love, loss, and, ultimately, redemption. [HarperCollins]
Ecco, 496 pages
09/01/2004
$26.95
ISBN: 0060722282
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Daily Telegraph Kate Chisholm
Reading The Falls is like walking a tightrope across a maelstrom. Your stomach lurches as you turn the pages. Fate is menacing, we are warned, but then what we fear does not happen. Oates lets us off, only to immediately pile on the tension again.
Entertainment Weekly Gillian Flynn
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.
Kirkus Reviews
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.[15 June 2004, p.555]
Los Angeles Times Charlotte Innes
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. [13 Sept 2004, p.E10]
Publishers Weekly
Oates adroitly addresses the material of this "first" class action lawsuit and makes the story fresh and immediate.
Washington Post Jane Ciabattari
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.
Sydney Morning Herald Ben Naparstek
So much pleasure is involved in watching this imagination at work that Oates gets away with it. Her stamina is contagious and more exhilarating than exhausting.
Library Journal Joshua Cohen
Oates uses the falls metaphor to powerful effect, dramatizing how our lives can get swept up by forces beyond our control. Highly recommended. [15 May 2004, p.116]
Houston Chronicle Sharan McBride
What makes The Falls so compelling a page turner is the way Oates ups the ante with each plot complication.
Booklist Joanne Wilkinson
This passionate, compulsively readable novel displays the full range of Oates' singular obsessions--the destructiveness of secrets; eccentric female characters given to rapacious appetites and volatile emotions; and the mysterious way that human emotion is mirrored in the natural world. [1 May 2004, p.1483]
Chicago Sun-Times Debra Bruno
Oates can tell a hell of a story. She can capture upstate New York's depressed grittiness and its industrial stupor as well as fellow novelist Richard Russo, the bard of upstate New York. She can make a character sympathetic and annoying in one line.
Christian Science Monitor Ron Charles
It's a great confluence of tones - grotesque and domestic, tragic and comic. The currents of various styles and points of view blend together in a way that can't possibly work, but does.
Daily Telegraph Caroline Moore
If anyone can sweep the reader away, it is Joyce Carol Oates, who packs more between the covers than most.
Boston Globe Chris Navratil
Serves as a kind of index to Oates's entire canon, representing some of the best and worst that she has to offer, rehashing familiar themes as well as a number of her signature devices: compulsive and emotionally tormented characters, self-fulfilling prophecies, dark secrets, lurid sex.
San Francisco Chronicle Claire Dederer
The middle 150 pages of this almost-500-page book are flat-out tough to read. After Dirk dies, we jump from perspective to perspective till we lose all interest. The gap between Dirk's death and his children's dawning realization of their family history may be realistic, but it makes for pretty dull reading.
The Guardian Maya Jaggi
Propelled by a succession of taut but tenuously linked mysteries and a flair for the minutiae of character, The Falls is often a good read but scarcely a great novel.
The New York Times Janet Maslin
The Falls hammers home two different visions of bravery, one linked to moral authority, the other to simple hardship and survival. They could well have formed the basis for two separate books, but it's somehow appropriate that Ms. Oates works so hard to bind them together. They make for one more uneasy marriage in a novel already full of wildly, tragically, soap-operatically strife-torn unions.
The New York Times Book Review Terrence Rafferty
One of the consequences, probably unintended, of her slapdash narrative approach and her hectic, rushed prose is that she's unable to disguise the wild fluctuations of her interest in the stories she tells. When Oates is fully engaged, you feel her excitement; and when she's bored, as she obviously is with the fate of the younger Burnabys, you feel that too.
The Spectator Hilary Mantel
A hundred pages into the book, the imagination is pummelled and queasy, like the bride after her wedding night. But, like Niagara Falls, Oates goes roaring on.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Lionel Shriver
Given the fundamentally dreadful composition of this novel page by page, the puzzle is why it isn't more painful to read.
PopMatters Samuel Carlisle
What bogs the book down most, though, is the author's distanced narration -- past-tense summaries that repeatedly gloss and re-gloss childhoods, decades, births, deaths rather than let dialogue or presently occurring events unfold in their natural immediacy.
The average user rating for this book is 10.0 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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