The book has the feverish energy, narrative propulsion and descriptive amplitude — sometimes to excess — of much of her earlier work ... Undoubtedly one of her most surreal and gruesome works, sparing no repulsive detail or nefarious impulse. In the end, though, the purview of the novel is larger than one might think, becoming an empathic and discerning commentary on women’s rights, the abuses of patriarchy and the servitude of the poor and disenfranchised. Oates, as is her wont, succeeds in creating a world that is apart from our own yet familiar, making it impossible to dismiss her observations about twisted natures and random acts of violence.
Joyce Carol Oates is masterful in this horrific portrait of a 19th century doctor who treats his patients more as subjects for experiments than as people to cure ... Oates is definitely giving oppressed and silenced women a loud, clear cry in this subtle, complicated story. But nothing is quite how it seems, even Jonathan's seemingly 'objective' motives. Strand upon subtle strand is woven together in a story that's part dystopian fable, part family drama, part feminist reckoning ... Weir isn't all evil, however. Oates is too good a writer for that, far too nuanced ... It takes a writer of great skill to pull of the feat of keeping a reader engaged through so much brutality. Oates' writing is so deft and the world she creates so vivid, one keeps turning the pages, all the way to the deeply unsettling ending.
Oates’ daring tale of grotesque medical experiments and other injustices is unnerving, illuminating, suspenseful, mythic, and, thankfully, tempered by transcendence and love.
Indeed, there are moments where the cruelty meted out by Weir feels repetitive and remorseless, though Oates would no doubt insist that’s how sadists operate. Nonetheless, as a study of a monstrous misogynist operating in the belief that he is a pioneer acting for the greater good and helping to ease female suffering, Butcher is vividly and compellingly drawn, its prose scalpel-sharp ... Just as Babysitter arrived in the aftermath of #MeToo, when the grey areas around sexual abuse came under the microscope, it can be no coincidence that Butcher, where women are stripped of bodily autonomy, arrives after the overturning of Roe v Wade. After 60 years in the business, Oates remains a master storyteller with her finger on the pulse of humanity, forever alive to its moral failures and flaws.
It all makes for a creepy, circuitous tale—one based on actual history—made all the more sinister by the putatively good intentions of Weir’s son, an abolitionist and advocate for the freedom of everyone but poor Brigit. Vintage Oates: splendidly written, and a useful warning to choose your doctors wisely.
Oates’s scathing indictment of the physical and psychological treatment of women by the medical establishment makes for compulsive but challenging reading. Unlike the ghastly procedures depicted, Oates’s inventive gothic novel pays off.
