Review of Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates

My experience with JCO books is that sometimes she gets into this mode of extreme, frenetic pessimism. Near-continual verbal abuse.

Characters spouting off like they have a compulsive speech disorder. Extreme levels of repetition. She continues circling the topics she often reverts to, without moving the plot forward. That is the case here. Thousands of sentences of internal monologue. Circling the topics of family strife, infidelity, domestic abuse, rape, lust, immorality, bullying, drug use, overspending, maliciousness, home-based horror. All the bad things. Over and over.
Aside from a few pop song lyrics, there is no light, no hope, no joy. The MC searches for it, grasps at various forms of love, but is continually worn down by the fictive friction of conflict, angst, rebuttal, destruction, complete annihilation.

A murder that is not so much a mystery as a way for the characters to inhabit their denial. A death. A family breaking apart. Verbal tics. A town castigating its people. This was all tackled in We Were the Mulvaneys, but better, without so much whining.

Emotions unraveling. People call each other names all day long. Unendingly. Potty-mouths. Negative feedback reverberating around an echo chamber decorated by grotty, hideous events.
If only it were a short story, constrained by the demands of a cinematic portrayal of violence, pain and sadness, dribbled out by self-destructing characters but digestible in one-sitting, ultimately forgettable. What can you expect out of a life built from such deplorable parts? A trainwreck on replay.

The narrator finds herself falling in love with a person with no redeeming qualities and then falling in love with the same person again, among similar persons. Falling in love with people who beat and insult her continually. She surrounds herself with these persons, gravitates toward abuse, keeps crawling back to a basketball court where bigger girls beat her to within inches of her life. Gets into cars with drunk drivers.
Obsesses over the the forbidden so-called conversation of a drunk maniac, who punctuates every sentence with 25 profanities, whom she calls her father, a ruined man, a tragic fool who dug his own grave with his bloodied hands.

“Worried about my probation.”(several people say)
“You’re probation. What about my probation?”
Pretty much everyone’s on probation in this town.
“Looks like she wetted herself.” (multiple times)
An unattractive, nasty, discomforting novel.
Catcalls, the epitome of human classlessness. A conspicuous lack of humor here. A man is accused of a capital crime? Hundreds of pages are spent detailing his vices. What should he do after getting accused. Buy a gun? YEAH.
Saying you love someone but never showing it. The despicable practice of spitting upon everyone’s reputation including your own – through gossipmongering, and profanity so profuse that the town is basically a sewer. No nice old ladies live here. Only potty-mouthed quasi-racist punks with custom cars and plenty of drugs.

Ugh. I decided to stop reading at 54% so maybe I’m missing something, but I doubt it.