Some reviewers have said that this book is about forgiveness and whether you can go home again, and to a certain extent I agree. But I think it's moreSome reviewers have said that this book is about forgiveness and whether you can go home again, and to a certain extent I agree. But I think it's more about whether it's possible to transcend something that broke you in a really fundamental way, and maybe whether it's even advisable to try.
Oates is taking a set of characters and doing a kind of experimental "test to destruction" on them. Take a kind, decent, good-hearted young man with a strong sense of right and wrong, and put him in a situation where he witnesses his comrades commit torture and murder, which he's helpless to stop. Take a young woman who is startlingly intelligent in unusual ways but also deeply insecure about herself, and put her in a situation where (from her point of view) everyone around her betrays her, mocks her, belittles her, hurts her, lets her down. Take a middle-aged family man who defines himself in terms of successful businessman, loving husband, beloved father, a figure of importance in his local social circle, and detach him from all of those identities. What are the fracture lines along which each of them will break, and who will be wounded by the shrapnel? Once broken, can they put the pieces back together -- should they even try? The picture formed by the reassembled fragments -- what relationship does it bear to the original? When the pin has been pulled and the grenade has blown your life to pieces, does it do any good to put the pin back?
Juliet, although very peripheral in terms of plot, is the one who seems to me to ask and answer those questions the most explicitly and honestly. Many of the others seem content to paper over the cracks (Zeno and Arlette, for example, drop back into the familiarity of their marriage as if it had never been questioned), but Juliet refuses to forgive and forget (though it's not clear she ever voices that refusal). The book leaves open the question of how Brett Kincaid will answer them.
When I finished this book I wasn't sure how I felt about it. But it won't go away. I keep thinking about it, revolving the characters and story in my mind, going back over the questions it raised. There's a power and resonance which, for me, make "like" or "dislike" irrelevant. What I can say is that I'm glad I read it, because it made me think....more
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