Joyce Carol Oates

My Life as a Rat is the shocking story of Violet Rue Kerrigan, youngest of seven children in a working-class Irish Catholic family living in hardscrabble early-1990s South Niagara, NY. Violet’s domestic life is largely governed by the family’s tight budget and her short-tempered father’s moods, attitudes and habits. This is a time and place where men and boys expect to be served and girls and women unquestioningly assume a submissive role. Violet’s world is also one suffused by an undercurrent of misogyny and racism, mostly unspoken but unmistakable and unavoidable, and coloured by a belief that loyalty to family is more important than almost anything else. Violet is unexceptional. She accepts life as it is. Smart and perceptive, she is not inclined to rebellion or defiance. She loves her parents and siblings. But everything changes one night when she is twelve. Violet is awakened when her two eldest brothers, Jerome and Lionel, return home from a night out drinking. She creeps downstairs and witnesses them washing up, using water from the garden hose to clean blood from a baseball bat, overhears them in whispers debating how to get rid of it. She suspects something is wrong but can’t imagine what it might be. But the next day she learns that a black boy from her school, Hadrian Johnson, has been found gravely injured after a violent beating and is in hospital. The situation escalates after Hadrian dies. Tormented by what she knows, Violet cannot hold back the secret, and when the truth emerges and her brothers are convicted, she is astonished to find that her family regards her actions as betrayal and want nothing to do with her. The novel follows Violet’s life in exile, living first with her aunt and uncle in Port Oriskany, and finally on her own, yearning for a reconciliation with her parents, fearing what her brothers could do to her once they’ve served their sentences and are free. As often happens in Oates’s fiction, the emotionally isolated female protagonist is targeted by predatory males who sense her helplessness and exploit her lack of trust in the world at large. And though Violet is a survivor—self-reliant, tough, capable of unscrupulous behaviour when it helps her escape untenable situations—it is her soft spot for her family that almost does her in. Throughout the book, Oates uses a breathless narrative style to create urgency and ramp up the tension: we compulsively turn the pages, knowing we’re in the hands of a master. In telling Violet's story, Joyce Carol Oates does not shy away from brutal realities. Undoubtedly My Life as a Rat is sometimes difficult, but it is a thoroughly engaging novel that delivers on its premise in spades.… (mais)

I was prepared to not like this book because, frankly, the title is bothersome. I thought, surely it’s going to be a disturbing book, controversial is some way or another with a title like that. Now, after reading it, the title is much less bothersome, although the book broke my heart, I didn’t find it disturbing in the way I was expecting. It was equal parts horrible and beautiful. I especially loved the writing style of the book. Everything flowed smoothly and, although there isn’t significant character development for most of the characters, it was enjoyable in its own way.… (mais)