What I Lived For (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

WHAT I LIVED FOR is a gripping dissection of contemporary American politics and mores that reveals, among other lessons, how tight the hold the past has on the present, and how difficult it is for anyone— an individual or a city—to escape it. Corky Corcoran appears, on most surfaces, to be the American success story. A fourth generation Irish American, Corky has become a millionaire in various business ventures, a city councilman, and a friend of some of the most powerful people in the city. Yet appearances in Oates can be deceiving, and just beneath the surface of Corky, as of his city, are some terribly corrosive forces at work. Those forces not only have killed a young woman Corky knows but also, in the end, will destroy Corky’s own life.

Joyce Carol Oates has written yet another dissection of the contemporary American political scene. The setting is upstate New York (in a city like Buffalo), but it could be anywhere in urban America where the political machine has control. The Irish-Catholic politics of Union City are as corrupt as they can be. Through Oates’s close inspection of the life and thoughts of one of the city’s leaders, readers become aware of why this is so.

Corky is a triumphant fictional character. An active alcoholic, a man who cannot maintain a relationship with a woman (they are always at fault), he is a George F. Babbitt for the 1990’s. Corky Corcoran should remind readers not only of Sinclair Lewis’ BABBITT but also of the fiction of more contemporary American writers such as John Updike (particularly the Rabbit Angstrom quartet of novels) or William Kennedy (whose historical fiction also concerns Irish Americans in upstate New York). No one writes more compellingly of the tragedy of American life that Joyce Carol Oates. In her previous novel, FOXFIRE: CONFESSIONS OF A GIRL GANG (1993), Oates showed the roots of contemporary America in the dysfunctional families of upstate New York in the mid-1950’s. In WHAT I LIVED FOR, she demonstrates what those lives have become, how those dysfunctions have only continued into the 1990’s.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XC, July, 1994, p. 1893.

Boston Globe. October 9, 1994, p. 15.

Chicago Tribune. October 16, 1994, XIV, p. 5.

Kirkus Reviews. LXII, July 1, 1994, p. 876.

Library Journal. CXIX, August, 1994, p. 132.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. December 18, 1994, p. 12.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIX, October 16, 1994, p. 7.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLI, August 15, 1994, p. 86.

San Francisco Chronicle. October 2, 1994, p. REV3.

The Washington Post Book World. XXIV, October 9, 1994, p. 5.