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Rating:  Summary: A Well-Boiled Pot from Joyce Carol Oates Review: Brutal murders, drug abuse, juvenile delinquency, satan worshippers -- yes, it's a new Joyce Carol Oates novel. Fresh from editing a collection of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction, Oates has been inspired to unleash upon the world a compelling series of nightmare incidents in the life of her protagonist, Ingrid Boone.Subtle it's not. The second half of the novel is full of campy scenes of grand guignol grossness that are so over-the-top they don't even try to suspend your disbelief. The prose is often fevered and ungrammatic, rattling on unpunctuated and uncontrolled like an uninspired parody of Faulkner. Most of the characters are caricatures at best, and their reductively Freudian motivations are appallingly simplistic.Amazingly, though, much of the novel is successful. Many of the scenes in the first 150 pages are viscerally effective, the sort of images you remember for days after a really interesting nightmare. Also, the character of Ingrid is complex enough to sustain the reader's interest through much of the book, and the ending is surprisingly moving. Some critics have been unnecessarily harsh on "Man Crazy", holding it to standards toward which it doesn't aspire. It's a potboiler, and a good one. Most of the themes were handled better in Oates's earlier novel "Foxfire", but "Man Crazy" is more fun. When Oates wants to, she can write serious and important novels like "We Were the Mulvaneys", but that's not the sort of thing she's writing here. This is Oates playing in Stephen King territory -- it's kind of like Pavarotti singing folk songs, but you'd probably never listen to folk songs (or Pavarotti) the same way again.
Rating:  Summary: If only she finished it earlier Review: I loved the first chapter. I ran around and forced most of my friends to read just the first chapter. It was brilliant in only three pages. Which makes it dissappointing that the end chapters are so ridiculous. I loved the way she set up this book. Was it a grouping of short stories or was it a novel. Very entertaining and had a flow that made you not want to set it down. Just let me read one more chapter before I turn out the light. The girl was depressed, uncertain of herself, had a kind of separation between her life as she lived it and her life as she percieved it. Basically we had a front row seat for puberty in all it's glory. I loved the descriptions of her face and her need to pick at it. The loving way she made herself bleed. Fantastic! And sex. How detached she was. How needy, hungry. Searching for the eyes of her father in the arms of random men. This is not unusual. There are more girls experiencing sex this way than with pillows and lace and candle lit rooms. I was eating this up. I was reading it every second I had. Then I notice, Enoch Skaggs. Ok, my willing suspension of disbelief is being seriously tested. The more chapters that are devoted to this group of Satan's children, the more I want to skip ahead to the ending. It's a fine thing for an author to take an idea to the extreme. Showing how your lack of love for yourself can get you into situations where no one could love you. Battered wife syndrom. But I am liking this portion of the book less and less. Overall, I am so glad that I picked this up. It is fantastically written and the style really flows. Because the beginning was so fantastic, I am willing to forgive the end and Satan's Children can rest in peace.
Rating:  Summary: Jumping the gun Review: I've only begun the book. I'm intrigued, but not by story line. I'm giving it five stars 'cause it's book that has caught my attention regarding writing ability/style/brains. Ah, there's the rub. Who's to know anymore if it's the author, publisher, software program or editor that has done the trick? My childhood friend has had four books published using a standard CD program for writing. What? I'm still hoping nobody played with Poe's words. And many others of course...........
Rating:  Summary: Jumping the gun Review: I've only begun the book. I'm intrigued, but not by story line. I'm giving it five stars 'cause it's book that has caught my attention regarding writing ability/style/brains. Ah, there's the rub. Who's to know anymore if it's the author, publisher, software program or editor that has done the trick? My childhood friend has had four books published using a standard CD program for writing. What? I'm still hoping nobody played with Poe's words. And many others of course...........
Rating:  Summary: Excellent Review: Joyce Carol Oates is one of our best chroniclers of degradation. In MAN CRAZY, she examines what it took to be a female camp follower of someone like Charles Manson (here named Enoch Skaggs and relocated to Upstate New York). Ingrid Boone grows up the daughter of a former aviator on the run and a good-time girl named Chloe who supplements her earnings by accepting money from well-off men who are "separated" from their wives. Even before the onset of puberty, Ingrid feels she must win approbation by offering sexual favors to the boys in her school. It is only a small step from there to becoming "Dog-Girl" for the sadistic Skaggs and his gang. The scenes with Skaggs's gang take a strong stomach to read through, as a "traitor" named Gem is put to death by Enoch and as Ingrid is passed around from man to man and "punished" by being thrown naked into a cellar overflowing with rubbish and feces. There is enough will to live (but only just) for her to escape and find help after having been locked in there for days. Oates is brilliant at showing us what horrors can lie behind the bland face of the pretty clerk who takes our applications or the receptionist who answers the phone and puts us on hold. The book ends with a now "rehabilitated" Ingrid looking at trees felled by a storm: "They were alive, only not vertical. The heartbeat inside them had maybe slowed, only a murmur but if you squatted to listen, if you knew how to listen, if the wind would die down you would hear it."
Rating:  Summary: Not worth your time Review: Maybe I am simply unfamiliar with what is considered "good writing" in books these days, but I will disagree with anyone who says that Oates's writing is good in this book. After reading the first few chapters, I became so confused that I had to quit reading the book. I do not recommend this book whatsoever.
Rating:  Summary: A dark journey into the depths of the soul Review: This book kept me up until I finished it all in one reading. And then haunted my dreams. Joyce Carol Oates has created a small work of art. Filled with disturbing emotional intensity, it is a non-stop journey into the darkest places of a human soul. On the surface, the story is simple. Against the landscape of Oates' familiar upstate New York territory, Ingrid is born to a Vietnam veteran and his young wife. The Vietnam vet is accused of murder and must go into hiding and during the next few years there are several secret visits. It cumulates in another act of serious violence. As Ingrid grows up she is used and abused by boys and men, finally joining a Satanic cult and almost dying as a result of their abuse. However, through the eyes of Joyce Carol Oates, this is not a simple story at all. Oates uses the first person throughout which makes the reader see the world through Ingrid's eyes, feel Ingrid's pain, and want to help Ingrid scratch all her insect bites till they bleed. Ingrid inhabits a sad and disturbing world. This is a harsh book. The violence is sick. It is hard to read. But I couldn't put it down. Couldn't let myself be anything but drawn into Ingrid's world. And couldn't help feeling the gut-wrenching emotion that was constant throughout. Oates follows her own rules in the writing. It is ungrammatical in places. Paragraphs are sometimes several pages long. Much of it is stream of consciousness. And there are jumps without explanations that plunge into yet new forms of despair. I will never forget the character of Ingrid, or that of her mother. They are defined by the thousands of details of their lives that Oates describes through the distorted prism of Ingrid's memories. This dark journey into the depths of the soul is not for everyone. It's too startling. Too intense. But somehow I feel it has enriched my life. And isn't that what art is all about?
Rating:  Summary: Creepy Review: This book was just creepy... Reading this made me wonder if some people's lives actually are so horrible . . . I suppose they are . . . maybe even some people I know . . . after all, although Ingrid's teachers certainly suspected that something was not quite right in Ingrid's life, surely they never realized how absolutely horrific everything really was. Parts of Ingrid's life story were beyond revolting- warning: not for readers with a weak stomach.
Rating:  Summary: Really twisted family values Review: This story of a young girl's coming of age is both touching and horrifying. Ingrid is born to an attractive young couple whose world falls apart when the husband, an ex Vietnam War pilot, gets involved in a drug smuggling homicide and has to go into hiding. His absense, and the shabby conditions of her life with her mother, form the basis of a lifelong obsession with being needed by men. Ingrid's descent from precocious child to promiscous teenager to the ultimate degradation of being "dog-girl" to a satanic motorcylce cult, is told unflintchingly. Believable at every step, it is a painful and disturbing tale. Oates style is like nothing I can remember recently. I don't know if this is typical of her books (this is the only one I have read) but she takes many liberties with syntax and punctuation, yet there is no sense of deliberately trying to be literary or arty and everything about the "voice" she chooses seems appropriate. It would not be correct to say that I "enjoyed" this book, but I did find it moving, fascinating, and ultimately satisfying. I will be in search of other fiction by Joyce Carol Oates - after reading some lighter stuff first, just to get Satan's Children out of my mind.
Rating:  Summary: Women! Read This Book! Review: This was the second book by Joyce Carol Oates that I have read. I liked the theme--a girl who eventually gets over her need for men, sex, and drugs. Very female-empowering. However, the Satanic stuff is more than a little scary, and hardly necessary. It took what could have been a beautiful story, and made it disgusting, and basically evil. All the characters were pretty unlikeable: the drunk, man-using mother, the sex-aholic main character that you just wanted to slap, the abandoning criminal father, and the Satan's Children cult. Actually, the content is potentially dangerous unless you have a strong relationship with Christ.
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