Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.

by Joyce Carol Oates

Overview

The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society by one of our most enduringly popular and important writers

Night Sleep Death The Stars is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all.

Stark and penetrating, Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel is a vivid exploration of race, psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing, as well as an intimate family novel in the tradition of the author’s bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062797582
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	06/09/2020
Pages:	800
Sales rank:	120,731
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.20(d)

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. Her most recent novel is A Book of American Martyrs. 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.

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey

Date of Birth:

June 16, 1938

Place of Birth:

Lockport, New York

Education:

B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961

Editorial Reviews

03/01/2020

In a small city in upstate New York, John Earle "Whitey" McClaren, 67-year-old former mayor and pillar of the community, attempts to intervene in an unprovoked police assault on an unarmed man of color. For his Good Samaritan efforts, he is tasered multiple times and suffers a stroke. Oates has set her latest novel in 2010, before the widespread use of body cams and before police brutality had fully entered into the national conversation. That Whitey himself becomes a victim seems like a flaw in the premise; as a white man, the same confidence and privilege that allow him to unthinkingly step into the conflict without fearing for his safety would likely have protected him from assault by the racist cops. That aside, Whitey's dispatch in the first chapter lets him become a cipher for his wife and five adult children, from whose perspective the rest of the nearly 800-page novel is told. Whitey was a towering, patriarchal figure, and his family members all defined themselves in relation to him. In his absence, they become unmoored and even unhinged. VERDICT A poetic meditation on psychological trauma and a complex and nuanced portrait of a grieving family.—Lauren Gilbert, Center for Jewish History, New York

Library Journal

2020-03-15
An already frayed family disintegrates in the wake of a tragedy.

Oates doesn’t always write long, but when she does, as in The Accursed (2013), the story enfolds a wealth of detail. Whether all of it is necessary is debatable. In this instance, John Earle McLaren, a respected elder in a small New York town, formerly its mayor, stops to admonish two cops who are rousting a "dark-skinned" motorist. Tased to the ground, McLaren spends what’s left of his life in the hospital, though it takes a few signatures for Oates to finish him off. The event draws together his very different children, who had always “contended for the father’s attention.” It wasn’t that Whitey, as he was widely known, was a cold fish so much as he was committed to the notion of being self-sufficient—and secretive, too, as the hidden bank accounts that turn up after his passing demonstrate. Meanwhile, daughter Beverly in particular is incensed that the siblings she regards as unworthy receive equal shares of the inheritance while Jessalyn, their mother, is set for life. Death pulls brothers and sisters together and apart. The most likable (and completely realized) character is son Virgil, who disconsolately flirts with death himself—“He’d drowned, but not died. Died, but was still here.” Daughter Lorene, too, a high school principal, undergoes a transformation that makes her at once more vulnerable and more human. Oates’ storyline would be the stuff of comedy in other hands—think of the recent movie Knives Out, for instance—but she makes of it a brooding, thoughtful study of how people respond to stress and loss, which is not always well and not always nicely. Yet, somehow, everyone endures, some experience unexpected happiness, and the story ends on a note that finds hope amid sorrow and division.

Long and diffuse, but, as with all Oates, well worth reading.

Kirkus Reviews

Timely, monumental. . . . Yet another piercing examination of American culture by the writer this reviewer considers our country's greatest living novelist. . . . It is brilliant. How blessed we are to have her as a novelist in our chaotic, confusing times. Night is spot on for these times of racial divide, as well as in portraying the fractious family dynamic that many of us know all too well. . . . Night deserves the top spot on your quarantine nightstand. Here's a fervent salute to Oates, our finest American novelist, for this one.

Star Tribune

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