New York Times Bestselling Author
Back in print in a new trade paperback edition, a classic Gothic novel from Joyce Carol Oates—a literary masterpiece of invention, artistry, and power
“Bellefleur is proof . . .that Oates is one of the great writers of our time. . . . A magnificent piece of daring, a tour de force of imagination and intellect.”—John Gardner, New York Times
The wealthy and notorious Bellefleurs live in a region not unlike the Adirondacks, in a mansion on the shores of the mythic Lake Noir. Powerful and influential, this prolific and eccentric clan includes several millionaires, a mass murderer, a spiritual seeker who climbs mountains looking for God, and a noctambulist who dies from a chicken scratch.
Bellefleur traces the lives of several generations of this unusual family. At its center is Gideon Bellefleur and his imperious, somewhat psychic, very beautiful wife Leah, their three children (one with frightening psychic abilities) and the servants and relatives, living and dead, who inhabit the castle and its environs. Their story offers a prfound look at the world’s changeableness, time and eternity, space and soul, pride and physicality versus love. Bellefleur is an allegory of caritas versus cupiditas, love and selflessness versus pride and selfishness. It is a novel of change, baffling complexity, mystery.
Written with a voluptuousness and startling immediacy that transcends Joyce Carol Oates’s early works, Bellefleur is widely regarded as a masterwork—a feat of literary genius that forces us, “to ask again how anyone can possibly write such books, such absolutely convincing scenes, rousing in us, again and again, the familiar Oates effect, the point of all her art: joyful terror gradually ebbing toward wonder” (John Gardner).
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