"Bellefleur" is the most ambitious book to come so far from that alarming phenomenon Joyce Carol Oates. However one may carp, the novel is proof, if any seems needed, that she is one of the great writers of our time. "Bellefleur" is a symbolic summation of all this novelist has been doing for 20-some years, a magnificent piece of daring, a tour de force of imagination and intellect….

What we learn, reading "Bellefleur," is that Joyce Carol Oates is essentially a realist. She can write persuasively of out-of-the-body experiences because she believes in them. But she does not really believe in a brutal half-wit boy who can turn into a dog, a man who is really a bear, vampires or mountain gnomes….

Miss Oates believes in these legendary characters only as symbols; and the problem is that they are not symbols of the same class as those she has been using for years, the symbols provided by the world as it is when it is viewed (as Miss Oates always views it) as a Christian Platonist's "vast array of emblems." The only really frightening scenes in "Bellefleur" deal with real-world atrocities—a boy's stoning of another boy, for instance, or the murder of a family by a bunch of drunken thugs—and these scenes in fact come nowhere near the horror of scenes in earlier novels by Miss Oates, such as the murder of Yvonne in "The Assassins." What drives Miss Oates's fiction is her phobias: that is, her fear that normal life may suddenly turn monstrous….

I cannot summarize the plot of "Bellefleur"; for one thing, it's too complex—an awesome construction, in itself a work of genius—and for another, plot surprises are part of the novel's glory. (p. 1)

Much as one admires the ambition of "Bellefleur," the novel is slightly marred by it: It too noticeably labors after greatness. The book has most of the familiar Oates weaknesses: the panting, melodramatic style she too often allows herself; the heavy, heavy symbolism; and occasional esthetic miscalculations that perhaps come from thinking too subtly, forgetting that first of all a story must be a completely persuasive lie. In "Bellefleur," the artifice undermines emotional power, makes the book cartoonish. (pp. 1, 21)

Unhappily, some of [the] motifs or plot strands—whose recurrence is unavoidable once the machinery gets rolling—are somewhat boring…. [There] is Jedediah Bellefleur, one of the recurring types in Miss Oates's fiction, the saintly man who, like Stephen in "The Assassins" or Nathan in "Son of the Morning," loses his hold on God.

Jedediah is interesting, up to a point, and he's both dramatically and symbolically crucial to the story; but I at least am sorry when, every few chapters, we have to return to Jedediah and watch him staring at something improbably called Mount Blanc or struggling with his not very interesting demons. ("He's nuts, that's all," we say, and slog on.) In the end Jedediah proves worth it all. He loses his sense of holy mission, thus becoming an appropriate focus of the blind and raging life force Miss Oates writes about in all her work….

Whatever its faults, "Bellefleur" is simply brilliant. What do we ask of a book except that it be wonderful to read? An interesting story with profound implications? The whole religious-philosophical view of Joyce Carol Oates is here cleanly and dramatically stated. She has been saying for years, in book after book … that the world is Platonic. We are the expression of one life force, but once individuated we no longer know it, so that we recoil in horror from the expression of the same force in other living beings…. We are all unreflectable nonimages in mirrors, creatures of time, and time is an illusion….

"Bellefleur" is a medieval allegory of caritas versus cupiditas, love and selflessness versus pride and selfishness. The central symbol of the novel is change, baffling complexity, mystery. One character makes "crazy quilts" in which only she can see the pattern. Another has been trying all his life to map the Bellefleur holdings, but everything keeps changing—rivers change their courses, mountains shrink. Time is crazy. In fact what is known in Shakespeare criticism as "sliding time" becomes a calculated madness in "Bellefleur."…

[This] is the most openly religious of [Miss Oates's] books—not that she argues any one sectarian point of view. Here as in several of her earlier works the Angel of Death is an important figure, but here for the first time the Angel of Life (not simply resignation) is the winner….

[Jed] becomes the instrument of the blind life force that, accidentally, indifferently, makes everything of value, makes everything beautiful by the simple virtue of its momentary existence. Thanks to Jedediah, God goes on senselessly humming, discovering Himself. That is, in Miss Oates's vision, the reason we have to live and the reason life, however dangerous, can be a joy, once we understand our situation: We are God's body.

Joyce Carol Oates is a "popular" novelist because her stories are suspenseful (and the suspense is never fake: The horror will really come, as well as, sometimes, the triumph), because her sex scenes are steamy and because when she describes a place you think you're there. Pseudo-intellectuals seem to hate that popularity and complain, besides, that she "writes too much." (For pseudo-intellectuals there are always too many books.) To real intellectuals Miss Oates's work tends to be appealing, partly because her vision is huge, well-informed and sound, and partly because they too like suspense, brilliant descriptions and sex. Though "Bellefleur" is not her best book, in my opinion it's a wonderful book all the same. By one two-page thunderstorm she makes the rest of us novelists wonder why we left the farm. (p. 21)