Review of Breathe by Joyce Carol Oates

A heart-rending meditation on grief.

Our protagonist’s battle with losing her partner encapsulates all the stages, every sidereal and ethereal sentiment imaginable.
Shaped within the austere landscapes of New Mexico, through achronological snippets of her university life, in and out of the hospital as Gerard succumbs to a generic illness, our protagonist recounts her days intimately, devotedly – if only we could all be loved so thoroughly. Her comprehension of the situation and eventually perhaps her sanity, waver. She sees him everywhere and in everything, struggles to redefine her life without him, hearkens back to the stabilizing force of their partnership.
Widowhood is a tragic trauma depicted here with much power and at great length, carving out the intimate details that make it feel real.
One of my favorite JCO books, but I would not read it again. (One does not reread JCO books when there are always more of them to add to the reading list). It is a tough and repetitive account of loss. But the repetition adds strength and character to the experience, it reinforces the principles underlying the stricken psyche at its center.
JCO works well with a small cast, funneling massive amounts of personality into her character’s compact bodies and single-track minds. Could this be an analog for the author’s own feelings?
Michaela provides our viewpoint – one fractured and seemingly slowly dissolving due to the horror and agony which death brings in its wake.
A masterclass on building sympathetic character, JCO leaves no stone unturned in her narrator’s mind. Interiority, projecting into exterior narration, mingling with imaginative extrapolation, sinking and rising flows of consciousness in which the reader is immersed. An effective technique employed by the author in countless instances of multi-layered writing throughout her body of work, but rarely tiring, ceaselessly engaging because it touches on universal truths and personal sources of despair.
Put the character’s heart on the page, along with their motives, loves, and their entire mind, fraught and intrepid in its wracking emotion, thereby communicating to your audience the truest form of suffering you know, that destruction of self which accompanies the advent of mortality, the realization that we are frail entities, wandering a confusing yet beautiful maze, brief as a candle flame the single flicker of which can but illuminate a small corner of this immense cosmos.