When a plot grossly outweighs the main story, as it does here, the form is inefficient or else the novel is satirical. Bellefleur is definitely not satirical. It is an incredibly elaborate gothic romance, stuffed to overflowing with outsize, grotesquely intense characters who speak to one another breathlessly, in a rage or merely incoherently, and who beg to be taken as emblems for moral qualities or historical forces, or both. (p. 4)

It is certainly possible to read and enjoy a novel with characters and incidents like these: Faulkner, Garcia Márquez, Flannery O'Connor, and many other modern writers have asked us to face grotesque forms of violence, and by so doing have explored basic themes of character and destiny. But when there is no dramatic logic to those events and characters, when what happens is not inevitable but merely gratuitous, the book fails to move or inform us. Particularly disturbing in this case, however, is not that Bellefleur fails to move or inform us, but that it seems to function as a means of expressing the author's fantasies, for that is what one is forced to conclude from the sheer gratuitousness of the violence and nightmare. Dreams and fantasies hold to different logic than that of narrative art, which is why people quickly grow bored when one tries to recount them; they have a use solely for the dreamer and the fantasizer.

Furthermore, Bellefleur is shockingly humorless, shocking because it is so long and because one cannot understand how an author could avoid creating comical consequences with characters so frequently and bizarrely in conflict. But then dreams and fantasies too are seldom comical.

Beyond this, the language Oates employs is revealing. Lengthy, serpentine, wildly elaborate sentences, uselessly heaped-up modifiers, and phrases and clauses that simply repeat previous phrases and clauses create an inflated, baroque style that is undercut by dashes, exclamation points, italics, ellipses, bad grammar and downright inaccuracies, all combining to give the impression that what we are reading is an author's rough draft. This makes sense, however, if the author is merely fantasizing. After all, one does not revise dreams or fantasies, one simply experiences them.

Bellefleur is not bad because Oates' strategies fail, or because she writes sloppy prose, or because she is humorless; the book fails because she has misused the ancient and honorable occasion for storytelling. This is not a literary work, it is a public showing of a private act, and that is why we are embarrassed when we read it. (pp. 8, 14)