The Accursed: A Novel

The time is 1905. The place is Princeton, New Jersey. Woodrow Wilson is the president of the college, but is not a happy or healthy man. His family associates with the Slade family, who are very wealthy and long-time residents of Princeton. The patriarch of the family is Winslow Slade. Winslow has four grandchildren he loves very much - Annabelle, Joshua, Todd and Oriana. Annabelle is getting married, Joshua is somewhat of an adventurer, Todd is, well, Todd, and Oriana is just a little girl. So, when very strange and awful things start happening to these four, the entire college community takes notice. One of the themes running through the story is about what people think of other people, who is better than who and who should be snubbed, most of these people being extremely wealthy. When people start disappearing, husbands start murdering wives, and people start thinking they're seeing and hearing ghosts, many become afraid of demons and think Princeton is cursed. Throw in Teddy Roosevelt as president of the US, Jack London as a total cad and Upton Sinclair trying to start a socialist movement to help those in need. I could not put this book down! Oates writing really brought her characters to life. I liked a lot of her characters and she made the demons completely loathsome. The ending totally blew me away. I was not expecting that. This story had the perfect ending and I thought it was one of the best endings I’ve ever read. I didn’t mind people in the story being preachy, because it was 1905 and a story about a minister, so I expected it. This was the first Oates novel I have ever read.

Let me begin by saying that "the accursed" is a fine, even brilliant, piece of work, judged by certain standards. Ms. Oates has reproduced the gothic novel quite effectively; yet she has done much more.The book, filled with a rich series of concise psychological portraits that are, by turn, touching, amusing, and chilling, manages to evoke a wide range of literary styles. She has cleverly reproduced T. C. Boyle's style of historical fiction; she has neatly repackaged H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, Mark Twain, and even John Irving (more on that later.) The book delights; but in the end it, like most of its characters, reveals a fatal flaw that the author--like her characters--falls victim to.In the course of the narrative, we're treated to horror stories, personal diaries, diatribes on socialism, and fairy tales, each weaving into the overall tale, but each one also an absorbing entity unto itself. The landscape is populated--and perhaps artificially overpopulated-- by a wide range of famous individuals including Upton Sinclair, Woodrow Wilson, Grover Cleveland, Jack London, and even Twain himself, all of whom end up looking, to one degree or another, like fools. The book careens through turn-of-the-century New Jersey society, painting what is, in the end, a rather bleak picture. The class-conscious nature of the period is exploited to good effect, but--that being said-- we don't get to touch the lower classes much, except as servants and murder victims.Ms. Oates' mastery of prose is unparalleled, her touch with characters nearly perfect. One excuses the obvious (some of whom are mentioned above) referents whose styles she recycles simply because she does it so deftly, so perfectly; her skill at this is a delight in itself. At the same time, some of the story lines get impressively tiring; so much is heard about Upton Sinclair, who in reality hardly figures within the main plot line, that one eventually grows weary, especially given the fact that his socialist obsessions render him, as a character, nearly as flat as the society he seems to think would be preferable, were the present one satisfyingly leveled. Some of the most wonderful bit characters, such as Puss, whose diaries are a sheer delight, end horribly--in this case hacked to death by fan blades, a trick certainly worthy of B grade horror, but perhaps not the A grade prose it's delivered in.But maybe its unworthiness is the point... very nearly everyone in the book turns out to be unworthy in one way or another, until any pretense of heroes or heroines is extinguished, with the notable and unlikely exception of the young Todd, who is dyslexic. (In hindsight, the fact that he can't read properly seems rather ironic, given his active life as a literary tool.) As in many fairy tales, an unlikely youth ultimately becomes the savior in this book, and that in a rather lovely (if unspeakably grim) fairy tale setting complete with, at least for all intents and purposes, the hall of a goblin king, and such.But enough of the descriptions; readers ought to pick up the book and take in its delights on their own, with the caveat I am about to mention, lurking at the very end of the book, when all the important denouements are actually over.Why Ms. Oates has chosen to end her book with a diatribe from the Reverend Slade will have to remain an open question, but the fact that she does so very nearly ruins what would have otherwise been a superb reading experience. In the first place, the sermon is completely unnecessary. The book would have created a powerful and lasting impression of mystery without the last chapter, and been much the stronger for it. It seems to be an example either of an author who doesn't know what not to put in, or an editor who doesn't know what to take out. Stridently delivered in all-caps (shades of Irving's Owen Meany) it is a hymn not to a better God, but a much, much worse one. God has taken quite the beating already in the past century; one has to wonder whether this isn't a case of beating the dead horse.Slade's sermon, an intense--to the point of caricature--screed blaming God--yes, God!-- for all the sins of man, invokes a wrathful, vengeful, completely self-involved Old Testament deity to explain the many machinations of the plot- at least, that is, from the point of view of the deeply corrupted and debauched Rev. Slade, whose judgment on many things, including the value of human lives, clearly can't be trusted in the first place. Why the reader ought to be left, as the last taste in their mouths, with something as sour and even repulsively rancid as this is as uncertain as Slade's reasoning, which fails to adhere to its own internal logic. The temptation, in fact, is to dismiss his rant as a fatally narcissistic cartload of horse puckey--which is largely the way it reads to a discerning mind.God, it appears, wants evil to exist in order to drive men towards him; God, we learn, is in fact actually evil, along with all his angels, or, at least, the ones whose relatively immaterial presences we are treated to in the book.Given the nature of Slade's transgression (which is nearly impossible for the average reader to miss figuring out long before the curtain is officially drawn back) if God is truly as Slade says he is, then God ought most definitely to have congratulated and even rewarded Slade when they first meet, holy-countenance-to-face; after all, he apparently desires evil, even celebrates evil; and if so, Slade's actions are commendable, not in the least worthy of conferring a curse upon him... which, unfortunately, is the entire mechanism upon which the plot of the book turns.To have the legs of the book's main premise so thoroughly kicked out from under it makes a mess of the ending. Ms. Oates gives us a universe whose moral roles are reversed: the temporal, human, and natural is positive, the Godly and divine negative. This somewhat pointless message is, in fact, a possibility in the range of philosophical options available to us for consideration; yet one isn't sure why, if at all, books ought to be written about it; even ones as good as this.Ms. Oates may enjoy presenting us with the negative--an arguably perverse habit in the first place--but we needn't have our faces rubbed in it in this manner, especially when the rest of the book is so finely crafted. She has taken what might have ended with a sweet air of mystery, and served carrion instead. While this may satisfy some primal urge of hers, it did not satisfy this reader.

The Accursed is a great American novel. I disagree with those who say it’s “not one of Oates’s best”: I found it compelling, amusing, thought provoking, hard to put down; and when it was over, I wished there’d been more—but I guess it can’t appeal to every reader. For one thing, it’s been pigeon-holed as a “historical novel” when it doesn’t really fit that genre—or any other: it seems intended to trample and confound the genres: it’s a horror story but never a thriller; it’s got demons but isn’t a “fantasy”; it’s a multi-layered comedy—but the jokes are too sad for laughter; it’s a psychological mystery wrapped in a futile political struggle, wrapped in discouraging historical vignettes; and in the end, these elements all come together to point the accusing finger at 21st century American hypocrisy.Plus, it’s a Modern gothic—“Modern” in the sense that Oates employs the “mask” of a limited-perspective narrator, whose voice and sensibilities are clearly not her own and who, despite his chronological remove from the plotline and despite his careful “objectivity,” must be seen as one of the novel’s main characters—for his prim remove can obscure as much as it illuminates (the reader, then, must judge independently of him: the historian is part of the problem, you see, when we try to apprehend the past—it’s a Schrodinger’s cat thing); and “gothic” in the sense that The Accursed takes form and tone from such 18th and 19th century megaliths as Melmoth the Wanderer and The Monk—which means it’s, slow, episodic, often other-worldly, and always coiling with sexual tension.And yet I think The Accursed is mostly a comedy. It’s certainly ”comedy” in the classical sense; and most of Oates’s historical portraits are caricatures; and at times The Accursed is even a farce: she names one of her prominent male characters “Pearce van Dyck”—which, obviously, could be the name of a campy male porn-star. This Pearce van Dyck is far from a stud—in fact, he’s a hyper-intellectual prude—but he vents his frustrations in such metaphors as: “If only I could PENETRATE this forest of clues” (emphasis added). If that sort of concatenation is up your alley, then The Accursed is probably for you.In any case, it’s not a “historical novel.” Yes, Oates has set it in a certain place (Princeton, NJ) and at a specific time: just between the Spanish American and First World Wars. And some of the events it depicts presumably “really happened”; and Upton Sinclair and Woodrow Wilson both play major roles, and numerous other celebs of that day—Jack London, Sam Clemens, Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt—even “Sherlock Holmes”—all make key, cameo appearances. However, The Accursed is not “about” them: Oates doesn’t show us, for instance, the “turning point” in any of their careers, nor do we see them develop here in novelistic ways. Rather, they all (except Wilson) have already attained their full celebrity, prior to the novel’s first chapter; and they now all seem largely stuck in ruts and incapable of, for instance, epiphany. In short, Oates is just using them all: they’re elements of the verisimilitude and, more importantly, they’re all poster boys: each represents a particular, historically valid male attitude.Upton Sinclair, for instance, is here to represent those Americans who, just prior to the First World War, believed in and diligently worked toward American Socialist Revolution. While Oates could have invented a fictional character to represent all that, we, with our biases and easy hindsight, might have thought such a character naïve or passé. By instead indentifying American Socialism with a “personage”—an “Upton Sinclair”’—Oates effectively removes it from the realm of fiction and places it where it of course belongs, in the realm of facts. This effectively limits the reader’s ability to make one of easy, pre-polarized modern judgments about it, and that enables Oates to conjure up the ghosts of American Socialism in a way that we today can still find sincere and optimistic. In the same way, Oates uses Woodrow Wilson to represent an upper class, Protestant, establishmentarian worldview that we, today, might mistake for shallow satire, where it not housed within the stolid, “real life” Wilson.The effect of it all is the reader can more easily imagine some of the novel’s “other” characters might also have once been “real,” and, further, that some of the novel’s more incredible events—those which comprise the “Curse” in its title—might have somehow “really happened.” Historicity, in short, becomes a solid platform from which Oates can boldly unleash a swarm of ghosts, demons, precognitive visions, mass hallucinations, and probative questions of “sanity.” Oh, and a resurrection of the dead, as well. Had she simply injected those otherworldly elements straight into our modern-day America, Oates might have given us just one more helping of dreary, Post-modern escapism. By grounding the fantasy in an “Age of Spiritualism” and by using historicity as kind of a “filter” on the reader’s perceptions, Oates has instead built a shimmering kaleidoscope.At the risk of including a few minor SPOILERS, I should sketch the major themes: the world that Oates depicts in The Accursed is one in which biology is destiny: the men lord it over the women; and most of the men are in turn oppressed by their yearnings for power and influence. These men’s struggles are abetted by—rather than being mitigated by—their rationalistic grasping at religious or philosophical straws. Through their base contentions, Oates develops two opposing worldviews: one we can call a “liberal” or “Socialist” view, the other a “conservative” or “Protestant” view. The Accursed is, in particular, concerned with the consequences for a society—and for the individuals comprising it—of sexual suppression and gender-based oppression. The novel is set at a time when Western women were marching in the streets for suffrage. The male character Pearce Van Dyck believes there are “more urgent matters” than women’s rights—“The ‘problem of evil,’ for one,” he says—but, as noted above, van Dyck’s conception of evil is rooted in the flesh. That makes his problem, in essence, that life proceeds ONLY by way of the flesh, which makes his assertion that “nothing can be done in any of our lives until… the Curse… is lifted” nothing less than the ultimate irony: only death can deliver the freedom that Pearce imagines we need. And meanwhile, a female character confides to her diary, “Is the terrible secret of the Curse—that it surrounds us & nourishes us?” And she, of course, is right. In the end, the two opposing “Idealisms” collapse in disturbingly similar ways: the “liberal” view hits a realization that “this world is sullied almost beyond redemption in hypocrisy, lies, and outright evil. Even Socialism… is tainted…” while the Puritanical view melt-downs with a rant that includes: “THE LORD OF HOSTS… HAS FORGED A COVENANT TO DISGUISE THE WORKINGS OF EVIL…IN THIS WAY TO PROMOTE EVIL….” Thus, neither side can possibly win the fundamental argument; and we in the “real world” are, by extension to parable, cursed as well: our real-world Conservatives are doomed by a prurient prudery that drives them mad; and our Liberals are doomed because a pop star’s sensuality is finally solipsistic and self-destructive. Even so, at novel’s end, the door may yet be open for a few brave, conscientious souls to try to find a way forward—although, what’s needed, evidently, is a sea change to our concepts of “self” and “society.” What’s needed, evidently, is a sudden divorce from our comforting web of conventions and grand delusions. So, if you think this novel’s about the past and not our present, think again!

No-one, but no-one, other than JCO could have pulled off this baroque spectacular that mixes Gothic camp with a vision of America cursed by a history of slavery, racism, misogyny, capitalist exploitation, and WASP-y hypocrisy.Vast, erudite and yet accessible, in one sense this book takes Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher with its idea of the family curse, and plays this out on a far wider canvas that expands from the sins of the Slade family, to those of the elite, conservative, privileged, self-satisfied bastion of turn-of-the-century Princeton, to America itself, still haunted by its own past: 'this accursed United State of America'. Ultimately the book offers up a vision of redemption, but one which enacts its own price.

This is an imaginative blend of historical fiction, social commentary and the supernatural. Ms. Oates has created very well developed characters and comments beautifully and subtly on the snobbery, racism and chauvinism of the US ruling classes at the start of the 20th century. This is epitomised by the puritan Anglo-Saxon “elite” of Princeton. As a comedy of social manners of the time alone it would work well. The character of Woodrow Wilson (President of Princeton University at the time) is particularly well drawn and his vanity and ingrained racism and sexism are very skilfully portrayed. Indeed there are a number of other “real life” historical characters including Jack London, Grover Cleveland (also a US President) and Upton Sinclair. Above all though it is a compelling if unusual supernatural drama. The depiction of the bog kingdom is superb and the paranormal reminds me of “Jonathan Strange & Dr. Norrell”. The evil of the devilish interlopers is also brilliantly evoked. The book is long, probably 100 pages or so too long but highly recommended if you like such a concoction of social comedy, horror and fiction. A great writer. Surprised at mediocre reviews but it's a matter of taste.

Atmospheric and unsettling. It took awhile for me to get into it, but once I did, I was utterly immersed.

I did not quite understand the plot, bur stilistically it was superb

Outstanding read