... timely, monumental ... masterful novel, yet another piercing examination of American culture by the writer this reviewer considers our country's greatest living novelist ... Whitey and Jessalyn's five adult children are brilliantly drawn characters, whose passions, politics, struggles and secrets fit well into the factions we Americans fall into ... Over hundreds of pages, their relationships play out in raw, authentic detail. Their encounters are revelatory, not just in the realm of family trickiness, but in the larger context of American culture, which these days is most painfully represented by people who lack the ability to step back and consider the other and his or her circumstances ... brilliant. How blessed we are to have [Oats] as a novelist in our chaotic, confusing times ... Three inches thick or no, Night deserves the top spot on your quarantine nightstand. Here's a fervent salute to Oates, our finest American novelist, for this one.
An immersive, discursive chronicle of a family’s reconfiguration following the death of its patriarch...and an otherworldly chord resonates through portions of its narrative ... Despite its bulk, this is a novel that doesn’t so much sprawl as scamper, at times darting purposefully off in the direction of a deadpan comedy of manners, a courtroom drama, a philosophical enquiry into the nature of art. It also provides a timely as well as damning snapshot of race relations and police brutality in the US ... There is much to relish in Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars., from its nimble pace to exuberant set pieces. As a portrait of a family and a nation, it’s funny and tragic and sometimes bleak. Indeed, if there’s fault to be found it’s simply that the novel reads like multiple books in one, and, inevitably, some of its narrative strands get passed over too quickly. This is particularly true of the sections dealing with police racism and its fallout. Though they’re vividly rendered, in order for the novel to hang together as a whole they must ultimately be subsumed by the overarching narrative, that all-American quest for self-realisation. In this case, the self-realisation of privileged white people. Given the intense topicality conferred by George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent protests, it makes for an uncomfortable juxtaposition.
If Dostoyevsky was a specialist in the 'dialogical,' Oates serves up something altogether more churning and (to borrow a term of praise, from a 1977 journal entry) 'agonizingly thorough' ... the novel is so teeming with nuances and details and inklings that you barely have time to register the irony that Whitey died in the course of defending a victim of racial profiling, despite having been soft on police violence during his time as Hammond’s mayor—or that Thom’s two causes are inherently at odds, one pertaining to the fallout of a racially charged assault, the other incipiently racist. At times, there’s little to hold on to. But then, why should the reader be afforded the feeling of terra firma so persistently denied to the characters? ... Oates’s habits are designed to unsettle us and, though pleasure is never out of the equation, the novel avoids many traditional narrative strategies for ginning up tension ... And yet there is great joy to be derived from the novel’s submerged patterns, its mind-boggling fecundity, its gallimaufry of devices...its combination of intricacy and lucidity ... Although Oates rejects cohesion as a formal virtue, she has a coherent vision of what literature can deliver. She believes in the itching and the ornery and the oddly shaped, and has been trying to produce fiction that feels as irreducible to simple meanings, as resistant to paraphrase, as the subject matter it portrays.
Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. is the latest installment in Oates’s uneven examination of cultural identity in America, arriving as protests over the killing of George Floyd have erupted in cities across America ... Oates is at her best—and make no mistake, her best can be spellbinding and heart-wrenching—when she inhabits Jessalyn ... a disquieting novel ... For a variety of reasons—the considerable length, or what Oates herself has called her 'dismaying proliferousness,' or, most unfairly, the fate of being published in the age of Covid-19—readers may resist this book. Still, it is squarely in conversation with this moment ... [her indictments are] too forgiving. The problem isn’t an inability to imagine, but a patent and systemic refusal. Such failure is willful, and if we tolerate its myriad manifestations—apathy, privilege, ignorance—we’re as complicit as the McClarens.
The book is a fictional addition to Oates’s A Widow’s Story: A Memoir. It is a book that is politically engaged ... Oates’s novel is about life in white America at the end of 2010, and it’s so extensive that a graduate-level English literature seminar would fail to discuss all of its machinations ... Oates’s writing is nearly flawless. Her pen is so brilliant that any reader may believe that they actually know what it is like to be in a coma. Not only does every metaphor hit, but she has perfected her stream of consciousness technique ... Oates makes such an interrogation of vanity that has not been done since William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
Grief permeates nearly every paragraph ... It’s extremely bold of Oates to examine in this untidy, ultimately redemptive novel the impact of America’s corrupt police forces on a white family rather than a black one. Yet, at the same time, it’s her white characters’ entitled, reflexive racism that provides the novel’s most savage indictment of America’s culture wars.
While Oates purposefully plumbs the depths of each family member’s agonizing loss, her perceptive study of Jessalyn’s widowhood stands out as an impressive and impassioned portrait of this distressing life journey.
Oates’ storyline would be the stuff of comedy in other hands...but she makes of it a brooding, thoughtful study of how people respond to stress and loss, which is not always well and not always nicely. Yet, somehow, everyone endures, some experience unexpected happiness, and the story ends on a note that finds hope amid sorrow and division ... Long and diffuse, but, as with all Oates, well worth reading.
...[a] weighty chronicle of a family’s reckoning with the death of a father and husband ... With precise, authoritative prose that reads like an inquest written by a poet ... Oates keep the reader engaged throughout the sprawling narrative. This is a significant and admirable entry in the Oates canon.
