BUTCHER

JOYCE CAROL OATES

Fourth Estate, 352pp, £16.99

Oates’s 64th novel is ‘ostensibly the story of Silas Weir, ‘Father of Gyno-Psychiatry’ to some, ‘RedHanded Butcher’ to others,’ wrote Sophie Mackintosh in the Literary Review. ‘At the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics, Weir devotes himself to the study and experimental treatment of female maladies that nobody else wants to address. Weir is modelled on actual doctors; his operations based on actual procedures inflicted on women.’

Butcher takes the form of a biography compiled by Weir’s son, in 1898, ten years after his father’s death. For the New York Times’s Daphne Merkin it ‘has the feverish energy, narrative propulsion and descriptive amplitude - sometimes to excess - of much of Oates’s earlier work’ and ‘disgust, particularly regarding the body, permeates the novel.’ ‘The constant stream of revulsion can be hard to stomach, but you do acclimatise, in part because the writing faithfully mimics 19th-century texts.

‘Littered with italics and euphemisms, it gives a sense of both authenticity and distance.’

Fiona Sturges, in Inews, noting Oates’s long interest in ‘themes of class, power and the dark side of human nature’, put Butcher ‘up there among the most brutal. There are moments where the cruelty meted out feels repetitive and remorseless, though Oates would no doubt insist that’s how sadists operate.’

‘Nonetheless,’ Sturges concluded, ‘as a study of a monstrous misogynist operating in the belief that he is a pioneer acting for the greater good and helping to ease female suffering, Butcher is vividly and compellingly drawn, its prose scalpel-sharp. Oates remains a master storyteller with her finger on the pulse of humanity, forever alive to its moral failures and flaws.’

LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE

TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER

Wildfire, 464pp, £20

“The Fleishman is in Trouble’ author returns with an ambitious, funny family drama inspired by a real 1980s abduction,’ wrote Susie Goldsborough in the Times, calling it ‘a bleakly comic vision of Holocaust trauma — how it’s repressed and inherited, how it can warp your perception of reality.’

‘No frills, no padding, a reporter’s attention to detail and a hint of salaciousness. Plus, as the story unfolds, an almost choral narrative voice that seems to rise up of its own accord from avocado-coloured kitchens, dishing the dirt on a family who are “not just rich but extraordinarily, absurdly, kidnappably rich”.’

The TLS’s Mia Levitin considered this second novel, ‘a family saga with Franzen-esque aspirations more ambitious than Fleishman,’ but ‘while we desperately need more comedy in fiction, the humour in Long Island Compromise doesn’t always land.’ She ‘couldn’t shake the feeling that this novel was written primarily with an eye to television.’

‘Brodesser-Akner,’ observed Goldsborough, ‘has created a majestically monstrous, mega-rich and messed-up family and put them through 400 pages of misery without ever quite giving us permission to care. There’s something exhausting about the tone of continuous cataclysm, the relentless, epic disasters that befall each character, one after another… characters are largely disconnected, their inner development arrested.’

The Lucy Atkins agreed, praisingAmericans are ghastly and will never change. But despite the engaging style, the brilliant eye for detail, the wit and scope, it is quite hard to be with these people for more than 400 pages.’