Book Review: "Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars." by Joyce Carol Oates

When I think of Joyce Carol Oates, I normally think of the woman who wrote the dark almost folk horror novels such as “The Corn Maiden and Other Stories”. I have read a bit of Joyce Carol Oates apart from that but, the following novel is really something I have never experienced by her before. When it comes to socio-political novels that deal with family dynamics as well as issues of racism, classism and police brutality - Joyce Carol Oates is probably not the author that comes to mind. Instead, authors like Toni Morrison, Harper Lee and others do. That is perfectly fine. But this novel by Joyce Carol Oates has really put her on the map as one of the great writers of the American Lifestyle novel. Examining the state of America through a small family in upstate New York is one of the joys of this book, the other is to be able to witness the interior family dynamics in comparison to the exterior social and political world. Both have an impact on each other and I think that the further you get into the story, the more you find yourself wondering how you didn’t notice this book before.

John Earle McClaren goes by the nickname “Whitey” and he is an ageing father and husband who’s also once the mayor of his town. As he is going through town one day in his car, he sees a bunch of police officers beating a nonwhite man to death and stops his car in order to take a closer look. He intervenes with the police officers, telling them they should stop. They don’t recognise him and taser him repeatedly. He dies of a stroke in the hospital some time later.

He leaves behind a wife and five adult children. Each child has an entirely different personality to the last and each of them reacts differently to losing their father. As the family starts to fall apart, we notice that the mother (Whitey’s widow) is undergoing some huge life changes after the death of her husband which look a bit like grief, but the children can’t be sure. From loneliness to fragility, from the emotional to the emotionless, Joyce Carol Oates gives each character a trait that defines them after the death of a family member.

The eldest son who gets the ball rolling into the investigation into how his father actually died, as the doctors stated that he crashed his car whilst having a stroke though no damage was seen on the car, was one of the best character of the early sections of the novel. The two daughters are horrid pieces of work from time to time, blaming the young fourth child Virgil for the death of their father for reasons that are complete nonsense.

One of the characters I really didn’t like was Beverly as she seems to have no idea why and how her mother is grieving at all. Always checking up on her, she tells Them to get the adopted stray cat out of her mother’s house but this is a cat that is helping her mother come to terms with the death of the family patriarch - Whitey. Lorene, the other sister, along with Beverly, are not entirely nice to nonwhite people and Lorene also interrupts the process of her students in the school she teaches at choosing a college as she finds out they make fun of her online and so, she contacts the colleges and says not to accept them.

One thing I love about this book is that it is so resonant of many different times in modern American history. Every single time period could possibly have a family just like this one and yet, there is no way to tell just how bad things could get if they were allowed to do so. It is such a well-crafted novel bringing every era of 20th Century America into it, though we know exactly when it is set.