Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Godwin, Gail (Vol. 22) - Joyce Carol Oates

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JOYCE CAROL OATES

"The Perfectionists," an engrossing and mysterious first novel, is a perfectly structured story, with chapters that follow one another logically, characters that are recognizably human and with whom we can "identify"; the narrative movement that contains the several meager—but awful—events of the novel's two weeks is conventional, traditional, even classic. A reader knows where he is going with these people—or thinks he knows—and so, when the novel comes to an abrupt end, when the final vision is set before him, the sense of mystery he comes away with is all the more haunting because there does not seem anything hidden, anything that might explain the several doomed "perfectionists."

Along with being nicely readable in form and style, "The Perfectionists" is also something of a suspense story. Its main characters are locked in a bizarre triangle: a young wife, her husband and his illegitimate child, a little boy named Robin. The...

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1. Introduction
2. Joyce Carol Oates
3. Robert Scholes
4. George Garrett
5. Katha Pollitt
6. Martha Duffy
7. Edith Milton
8. Zahir Jamal
9. Roberta Rubenstein
10. Karen C. Gaston
11. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
12. Copyright

1. Joyce Carol Oates