Overview

An intense roller-coaster ride into the abyss, MAN CRAZY charts the fall and rise of teenager Ingrid Boone, abandoned by her father, moving from town to town, taking what she can get and always giving too much in return. This is a novel about the horrors waiting at the end of the road for the innocent, but in the end it is about one girl's realisation that men don't make you more real, that pain isn't an integral part of normal life.

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9781860495472

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Reviews

'Her writing is sinister, gothic and full of atmosphere ... one of America's most original and disturbing voices' SUNDAY TIMES 'Oates is one of the finest and most devastating living writers ... this novel [is] extraordinary ... a darkly comic monologue of panic and desperation, which, thankfully, allows you back up once it's dragged you down' JULIE MYERSON, MAIL ON SUNDAY 'The bizarre twists and turns of Ingrid's life take on a hallucinatory intensity ... the one constant of the gripping story - the emotional deprivation that has scarred Ingrid for life - comes through with a fierce burning clarity' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Oates's 27th novel, following fast on the heels of last year's highly praised We Were the Mulvaneys, revisits the depressed upstate New York environs of her earliest (and perhaps most typical) fiction. It's the first-person story of 21-year-old Ingrid Boone, a small-town girl who has survived her estranged parents' rootlessness and chaotic behavior, a drug- and sex-addicted adolescence, and her captivity as the slavelike Dog-girl of a violent, messianic biker who rules a cult called Satan's Children. The narrative proceeds through a succession of dreamlike short scenes that replay Ingrid's sometimes discontinuous (though mainly chronological) memories and fantasies. Ingrid is a generously imagined and vividly realized character: The deprivations and self-hatred that set her on her self-destructive path are rendered with savage clarity, and Oates makes us believe that she's also a bright, sensitive girl who seeks imaginative refuge from her traumatizing circumstances by writing poetry. The characterizations of her mother Chloe, a weak-willed beauty who'll do anything to survive, and her father Luke, a Vietnam fighter pilot who knows he can't escape his violent nature ( I'm shit in the eyes of God ), are equally compelling - as is Oates's presentation of their helpless, mutually destructive love. But the novel has flaws, including occasionally slack writing and careless anachronisms. And in the character of the sexually charismatic cultist Enoch Skaggs, Oates draws another of the unconvincingly feverish caricatures that mar several of her more portentous stories. Nor does it seem necessary to spell out the source of Ingrid's sociopathic downward progression ( Crazy for men they say it's really your own daddy you seek ). Nevertheless, as in Mulvaneys, Oates shows us the paradoxical resilience that sustains people who endure more than we can imagine, and somehow hang on. Her boldly drawn grotesques reach out to us, making us believe in them and care about their fates. (Kirkus Reviews)

Ingrid's life is one of early promise turned to despair - a beautiful child of a broken marriage between damaged Vietnam vet-turned-criminal and a mother with a weakness for alcohol and older men. Oversensitive, she falls prey to a variety of nervous complaints before succumbing to the lure of the sinister leader of a Manson-style 'family'. Her transformation from shy schoolgirl to psychiatrically unstable, scarred, heroin-addicted Dog Girl makes painful reading. But this extraordinary book - a white-trash classic if ever there was one - ends on a note of hope. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938. She has written many novels and numerous collections of stories, poetry and plays. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.

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