Word: bellefleur
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...FICTION: Bellefleur, Joyce Carol Oates Consenting Adults or The Duchess Will Be Furious, Peter De Vries∙Joshua Then and Now, Mordecai Richler ∙Music for Chameleons, Truman Capote Rough Strife, Lynne Sharon Schwartz∙The Magic Labyrinth, Philip Jose Farmer∙The Second Coming, Walker Percy
...BELLEFLEUR by Joyce Carol Oates Dutton; 558 pages...
...have no choice but to be Americans now," says Raphael Bellefleur, descendant of French aristocrats and now the owner of a baronial estate in the New World. But what is an American? The question has provoked writers as diverse as Henry James and Gertrude Stein, and it haunts Joyce Carol Oates throughout this vast seven-generation epic. That is not all that haunts her. Oates' twelfth novel informs the occult with Freudian insights. Boys change into hounds, men into bears; a man, swallowed by a great flood, returns decades later to be recognized only by his 100-year...
...past, Oates' touch has often been too heavy to sustain her fantasies. Ironically, in the barocco world of Bellefleur she is deft and self-assured. Even her contrived ending cannot mar a work that immeasurably enriches the 200-year-old tradition of the gothic novel...