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A review by bellebelly
I'll Take You There by Joyce Carol Oates
1.0
Wow. I really did not like this book. I was about 1/3 of the way through by the time I decided I really didn't care for it, though, and I didn't have anything else to read at lunch, so I decided just to stick with it.
I recently read an interview with Joyce Carol Oates where she said this was the most autobiographical of all her books. If that's the case, apparently I violently dislike Joyce Carol Oates, or at least I would have when she was in college. The unnamed (or multi-named) protagonist leaves her emotionally distant family for college and proceeds to try to fill the need she feels for family. First, at a sorority, then with a guy. (I was greek in college, but my feelings towards this book aren't really related to the negative portrayal of the greek system. Her portrayal is fair, especially, I imagine, for the early 60's.) Neither of these attempts worked out. And if she had taken five minutes to think about the consequences of her actions, she would have seen what a debacle both would have been.
Usually I side with the outsiders, losers and weirdos, but this time I was siding with the pack. It's not just that the heroine here was a freak, it was that she didn't have any good reason for being one, or for putting herself in a situation where it would matter. And later, she's a snivelling synchophant with her black boyfriend (who she claims she fell in love with hearing his voice from the back of the class before she knew his race, but at this point in the book she is so eager to show up her former sorority sisters and other figures of authority and normalcy that the claim isn't credible).
The other thing about this book was that the descriptions of things like body functions & odor, dirty hair, stuffy rooms and even (actually, especially) food are graphic to the point of being nauseating. I wasn't wanting or expecting a book about a college girl to put me off my lunch!
I recently read an interview with Joyce Carol Oates where she said this was the most autobiographical of all her books. If that's the case, apparently I violently dislike Joyce Carol Oates, or at least I would have when she was in college. The unnamed (or multi-named) protagonist leaves her emotionally distant family for college and proceeds to try to fill the need she feels for family. First, at a sorority, then with a guy. (I was greek in college, but my feelings towards this book aren't really related to the negative portrayal of the greek system. Her portrayal is fair, especially, I imagine, for the early 60's.) Neither of these attempts worked out. And if she had taken five minutes to think about the consequences of her actions, she would have seen what a debacle both would have been.
Usually I side with the outsiders, losers and weirdos, but this time I was siding with the pack. It's not just that the heroine here was a freak, it was that she didn't have any good reason for being one, or for putting herself in a situation where it would matter. And later, she's a snivelling synchophant with her black boyfriend (who she claims she fell in love with hearing his voice from the back of the class before she knew his race, but at this point in the book she is so eager to show up her former sorority sisters and other figures of authority and normalcy that the claim isn't credible).
The other thing about this book was that the descriptions of things like body functions & odor, dirty hair, stuffy rooms and even (actually, especially) food are graphic to the point of being nauseating. I wasn't wanting or expecting a book about a college girl to put me off my lunch!