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You Must Remember This

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You Must Remember This Overviews

Joyce Carol Oates's epic novel of an American family in the 1950's probes the tender division between the permissible and the forbidden, between ordinary life and the secret places of the heart. Set in an industrial, working-class town in upstate New York, this book chronicles the frustrating marriage of parents Lyle and Hannah; the idealistic political journey of son Warren, and the passionate, obsessive relationship that develops between 15-year-old Enid Maria and her uncle Felix, a professional boxer twice her age. While brilliantly re-creating a decade that worshipped conformity, You Must Remember This presents the lives of family members that break every convention in the search for meaning and fulfillment.

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You Must Remember This CustomerReview

This novel from 1987 by Oates hits many of Oates's strengths with a touch of Lolita or incest, but without the mental obsessions of Nabokov's famous novel. All in all, it is one of Oates's most interesting novels and I recommend the book.

Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 in upstate New York State and is a distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton. She gained fame with her first novel With Shuddering Fall in 1964. Now four decades later, she is the author of scores of novels, many short stories, essays, plays, and poetry. The present novel from 1987 is somewhere near the middle of the chronological order of her body of work and we see the polished prose of an experienced writer.

I have read a number of her works from different time periods in her career and set up a Guide to Joyce Carol Oates Listmania list. Compared to her early novels, this is a straightforward and almost a "light" read. It contains some drama but there are a few intense scenes, but less than in some other works. The novel has a good story structure and easy prose, and the reader is spared the "too much prose" found in some early works such as The Assassins. The read is mostly compelling.

Oates is known for her emotional and dramatic stories, often with women or even poor women such as students or teachers caught up in stressful situations, and often set in her native upstate New York (Niagara River - Syracuse - Erie,PA. triangle). Actually, some of her best work is found in her 10 to 20 page short stories, which are often dramatic, sometimes very intense, and many involve off-beat characters, and they include rapes, murders, and people with serious mental health issues, etc. People who have not read her collections of short stories should take a look at those. The present novel contains many of those off-beat elements. It is a story set in a town in upstate New York. The story is about a middle class family and their uncle, a retired fighter, who is about 20 years younger than the father. The father runs a used furniture store. The story is set in the post WII years and the fifties, and contains some political and social elements from that era including the development of nuclear weapons, peace protests, bomb shelters, the McCarthy hearings, citizens being arrested for being suspected communists, Cadillac cars with big fins, etc.

The story is mostly about the youngest daughter, Enid Stevick, who is a young teenage student and their flamboyant uncle aged 30 or so, Felix. As mentioned, he is their father Lyle's step brother. They live in the industrial port town of Orinskay, New York, a town similar to other American industrial towns on the Great Lakes.

This is a relatively compelling read, but lacks the intensity of some of Oates's short stories. As a work by Oates it is a well balanced and interesting work. It is about the characters and how they change as they age, and particularly but not exclusively the interaction of Uncle Felix and Enid. This is one of her better novels, on par with We Were The Mulvaneys, a more recent novel.





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