Rarely has Joyce Carol Oates created a protagonist as compelling as Violet Rue Kerrigan, the young woman who painfully comes of age in My Life as a Rat ... [a] dark, taut novel ... every few books, [Oates] pens a near-masterpiece, a story that captures some of the darkness in American life. My Life as a Rat is one of those gems, with Violet the vehicle for several explorations, including the ways vulnerable girls and young women can fall prey to domineering men and how loyalty to family can lead to betrayal of the self.
There are moments when even the most jaded and experienced reader of serious epic dramatic literary fiction might feel the pages of a new book glowing and expanding their notions of what they might expect to receive from a contemporary novel ... Oates has always been a master when it comes to connecting her characters with the seductive lure of their surroundings ... Hope stays hidden from the beginning of this novel and throughout the story, with a barely discernible pulse, and we keep reading for the possibility that it might rise from the dead ... Indeed, the strongest guarantee by the end of this book is the consistency of melancholy, the persistence of an existence where fate is determined by class, race, gender, economy, and geography ... My Life as a Rat shimmers with possibilities by the end of its story ... Most remarkable is that Oates has added another unforgettably strong woman character to her canon.
Oates is especially effective in picturing the internal life, the self-perceptions of Violet Rue, as memories and fears from the past crisscross her uncertain path into the future. The prose never bogs down and as the story pushes forward, the reader is eager to be pulled along. My Life as a Rat is keenly aware of the feelings of its female characters and the dangerous ways of men ... My Life as a Rat includes many meaningful sideways glances at other issues ... Oates correctly records the currents of class resentment and racial backlash that run like live wires under American society.
My Life as a Rat is Oates at her best — a powerful, uncompromising story that explores racism, misogyny and recent American history ... Oates inhabits [the protagonist] with great sensitivity.
Rarely has Joyce Carol Oates created a protagonist as compelling as Violet Rue Kerrigan, the young woman who painfully comes of age in My Life as a Rat. And that’s saying something, because Oates, one of America’s greatest living writers, has created many unforgettable characters in her scores of novels, novellas and short stories ... [a] dark, taut novel ... Oates has been much scolded for writing too much, too fast, too carelessly, but she ignores the swats and does her thing. Some of her works deserve that judgment. Yet every few books, she pens a near-masterpiece, a story that captures some of the darkness in American life. My Life as a Rat is one of those gems ... this is a gripping coming-of-age story, at turns horrifying, heartbreaking, poignant and buoying. The writing is tighter and finer than in many of Oates’ books. Now in her late 70s, she is at the height of her powers, and America has never needed her piercing observations more than it does now.
Oates has long been preoccupied with male violence, racial strife and female victimhood. My Life as a Rat has all three of these elements in abundance ... After a while, Violet’s trajectory seemed predictable, her torturous penance too prolonged. I kept hoping for a Lisbeth Salander moment, when she’d start punching the world back.
Oates’ frequent themes of exile, predators and their victims, racial conflicts, and gender violence coalesce in this psychologically and socially complex portrait of a young woman’s struggle as she loses her family but finds herself ... Though marked by sexual victimization, Violet's childhood as an outsider longing for acceptance will resonate with empathetic teens.
In , Oates favors response over insight, emotion over analysis. The Kerrigans, apart from Violet, are representative types more than fully fleshed-out characters. But they feel terrifyingly real as they refuse to take responsibility for their own actions and crimes, choosing instead to banish Violet ... Oates’ idiosyncratic style is dreamy in its breathless tenderheartedness and just as often nightmarish in its honest detailing of a variety of abuses, prejudices and violence. Race, gender, family loyalty: Oates tackles them all here. Like Violet’s vision of her family, My Life as a Rat is painfully sharp but fuzzy around the edges. A beautiful and frightening novel, even with its gaps and liberties taken, it leaves readers with a sorrow and a cautious hope for Violet’s survival.
...remarkable ... Oates’s novel adroitly touches on race, loyalty, misogyny, and class inequality while also telling a moving story with a winning narrator. This book should please her fans and win her new ones.
Her mental stability sometimes deteriorates into the fever-dream state Oates can evoke so well; the author shifts point of view among first, second, and third person as if Violet can’t even get a grip on her own identity ... Oates explores the long echoes of violence born of sexism and racism in one young woman’s life in this deft psychological thriller.
