Mudwoman

Joyce Carol Oates

HarperCollins

Otago Daily Times. April 14th 2012

Whether writing short stories or longer prose, Joyce Carol Oates is a master of unease, creating dark and frightening worlds that leave the reader full of disquiet.

Her latest novel, Mudwoman, is no exception.  It opens in 1965 as a young girl is cast into the mud of the Black Snake river by her mother and left to die.  Although her physical body survives, a part of her soul remains lost in slough and her life becomes a series of assumed identities; first as her older sister Jewell, which is the name she gives her rescuers, then as Meredith (“Merry”), the child her adoptive parents choose to fill the emptiness left by their own Merry’s death, and finally as MR Neukirchen, philosopher and first female president of a prestigious University, a woman of whom such beginnings would be unthinkable and who keeps her desperate need for love and acceptance hidden from everybody, even herself.

Yet somehow the taint of mud remains, and through the same imagination that has allowed her to free herself from that abandoned child, the past slowly reaches out to reclaim her.  Mudwoman is the story of her self-creation, slow disintegration and (possible) redemption, alternating chapter by chapter between Jewell/Merry’s childhood and MR’s descent into a paranoid twilight where reality and dream become indistinguishable.  Whether it is her mother’s legacy of madness or the fracturing of an identity she no longer has the strength or self-belief to sustain is not clear, but whatever the cause we are dragged with her into the half-light where all is uncertain and nothing can be trusted. 

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/where-all-uncertain-and-nothing-can-be-trusted