Mudwoman - by Joyce Carol Oates (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

One of the most acclaimed writers in the world today, the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates follows up her searing, New York Times bestselling memoir, A Widow's Story, with an extraordinary new work of fiction. Mudwoman is a riveting psychological thriller, taut with dark suspense, that explores the high price of repression in the life of a respected university president teetering on the precipice of a nervous breakdown. Like Daphne DuMaurier's gothic masterwork, Rebecca, and the classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, Oates's Mudwoman is a chilling page-turner that hinges on the power of the imagination and the blurry lines between the real and the invented--and it stands tall among the author's most powerful and beloved works, including The Falls, The Gravedigger's Daughter, and We Were the Mulvaneys.

From the Back Cover

Mudgirl is a child abandoned in the silty flats of the Black Snake River. Cast aside, Mudgirl survives by an accident of fate--or destiny. After her rescue, the well-meaning couple who adopt Mudgirl quarantine her poisonous history behind the barrier of their middle-class values. But the bulwark of the present proves surprisingly vulnerable to the agents of the past.

Meredith "M.R." Neukirchen is the first woman president of an Ivy League university. Her commitment to her career and moral fervor for her role are all-consuming, but when confronted with challenges to her leadership she could not have anticipated, the fierce idealism and intelligence that delivered her from a more conventional life threaten to undo her.

A reckless trip thrusts M.R. into an unexpected psychic collision with Mudgirl and the life M.R. believes she has left behind. A powerful exploration of the enduring claims of the past, Mudwoman is at once a psychic ghost story and an intimate and compelling portrait of a highly complex contemporary woman cracking the glass ceiling at enormous personal cost.

Review Quotes

"Oates begins her 38th novel with a nod to Nietzsche ("What is man? A ball of snakes") that lies at the mud-caked heart of this tale of the rise and stumbling fall of M.R. Neukirchen, a brilliant academic whose childhood starts in the mudflats of the Black Snake River, where she is abandoned in 1965...fans will relish the depth of this inquiry." - Publishers Weekly

"[A] disturbing, psychological thriller." - New York Post

"For Oates, Mudwoman is a hybrid novel in more ways than one. It represents a rare conjoining of the rough, somewhat brutal world of her childhood, to which she has regularly returned in her fiction, and the rarefied academic milieu she has inhabited for most of her adult life but has depicted less frequently in her writing." - Washington Post

"This chilling novel opens with a child left to die in a silty riverbed, a memory that no amount of later life success can erase." - O, the Oprah Magazine

"Joyce Carol Oates' latest novel is about many things, but first and foremost it is about the complications of being a high-achieving woman in the 21st century...Oates tells [her protagonist's story] with a detail and relish that's both heartbreaking and fascinating." - Ms. magazine

"Madness and malevolence squirm on almost every page in Joyce Carol Oates' 38th novel... Oates' dark brilliance is ever evident in her main characters, complex souls with mysterious corners in their psyches..." - Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Oates is an extremely visceral writer...Mudwoman is a genuinely unsettling book in which Oates pays her readers the compliment of never letting them settle or even being entirely sure about what they have just read. For a young novelist, this kind of risk-taking would be admirable; for a 73-year-old with more than 50 novels to her name, it is extraordinary." - Financial Times

"Oates is an extremely visceral writer...Mudwoman is a genuinely unsettling book in which Oates pays her readers the compliment of never letting them settle or even being entirely sure about what they have just read." - Financial Times

"...The Oates style, with its fractious barrage of dashes, suggests what [Emily] Dickenson might have produced if she had written doorstop novels instead of short poems...[Oates] is especially perceptive in showing the political tightrope that M.R. has to walk in her powerful but fragile position at the university..." - Wall Street Journal

"There is a landscape of murk and junk, dark water and black mud, trash and detritus and debris, desolate woods, rickety bridges over ugly rivers, rust and barbed wire, that lurks under a lot of Joyce Carol Oates's writing...Mudwoman is very good at the performance of the public life of the woman president...The unraveling of this performance is grippingly horrible." - New York Review of Books

"Mudwoman is very good at the performance of the public life of the woman president...The unraveling of this performance is grippingly horrible." - New York Review of Books

"Oates [displays] the insights into human bonds that make her brilliant....Oates makes [her character's] torment come alive. We grasp her compulsion to return to the mud of the past in order find her true self." - USA Today

"Uniquely personal... an intriguing departure from token Oates tales." - Huffington Post

"[A] disturbing exploration of selfhood...As always, Joyce Carol Oates masterfully evokes a sense of menace, if not malevolence, while drawing her readers deep into the psychology of her characters...Oates has her readers asking with MR if the human predicament is ultimately the effort to remain human. Mudwoman is a dark, intelligent and deeply compelling novel, Joyce Carol Oates at her best, which will hold you in its thrall until the end." - Washington Independent Review of Books

"[A] disturbing exploration of selfhood...As always, Joyce Carol Oates masterfully evokes a sense of menace, if not malevolence, while drawing her readers deep into the psychology of her characters... a dark, intelligent and deeply compelling novel... which will hold you in its thrall until the end." - Washington Independent Review of Books

"Even as [Mudwoman] travels over familiar Oates territory, there's a freshness to this novel, a sense of some new, more personal beginning. It's bold of Joyce Carol Oates to paint achievement akin to her own as just the flip side of victimization - and it's perhaps even bolder to make such visceral drama from the story of a workaholic who finally confronts life unhooked from a keyboard." - New York Times Book Review

"There's a freshness to this novel, a sense of some new, more personal beginning. It's bold... to paint achievement... as just the flip side of victimization--and it's perhaps even bolder to make such visceral drama from the story of a workaholic who finally confronts life unhooked from a keyboard." - New York Times Book Review

"In this extraordinarily intense, racking, and resonant novel, a giant among Oates' "big" books, including The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007), chilling archetypal mysteries vie with ringing indictments of war, academic and corporate malfeasance, and environmental destruction. Masterfully enmeshing nightmare with reality, Oates has created a resolute, incisive, and galvanizing drama about our deep connection to place, the persistence of the past, and the battles of a resilient soul under siege from within and without... A major, controversy-ready novel from high-profile, protean Oates." - Booklist (starred review)

"Extraordinarily intense, racking, and resonant... Masterfully enmeshing nightmare with reality, Oates has created a resolute, incisive, and galvanizing drama about our deep connection to place, the persistence of the past, and the battles of a resilient soul under siege... A major, controversy-ready novel from high-profile, protean Oates." - Booklist (starred review)

"[A] powerful novel...[Oates] deftly interweaves M.R.'s present, memories of her troubled childhood, and her feverish hallucinations...This hypnotic novel suggests that forgetting the past may be the heavy cost that success demands." - The New Yorker

"Oates [displays] the insights into human bonds that make her brilliant. She perfectly captures the raucous foster family where the mother is both off-handedly affectionate to "Mudgirl," as they sometimes call the child, and emotionally abusive to her own children...Oates makes [her character's] torment come alive. We grasp her compulsion to return to the mud of the past in order find her true self." - USA Today