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    Carthage: A Novel
    Carthage: A Novel
    Carthage: A Novel
    Audiobook19 hours

    Carthage: A Novel

    Written by Joyce Carol Oates

    Narrated by Susan Ericksen and David Colacci

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A young girl's disappearance rocks a community and a family in this stirring examination of grief, faith, justice, and the atrocities of war from Joyce Carol Oates, ""one of the great artistic forces of our time"" (The Nation)

    Zeno Mayfield's daughter has disappeared into the night, gone missing in the wilds of the Adirondacks. But when the community of Carthage joins a father's frantic search for the girl, they discover the unlikeliest of suspects—a decorated Iraq War veteran with close ties to the Mayfield family. As grisly evidence mounts against the troubled war hero, the family must wrestle with the possibility of having lost a daughter forever.

    Carthage plunges us deep into the psyche of a wounded young corporal haunted by unspeakable acts of wartime aggression, while unraveling the story of a disaffected young girl whose exile from her family may have come long before her disappearance.

    Dark and riveting, Carthage is a powerful addition to the Joyce Carol Oates canon, one that explores the human capacity for violence, love, and forgiveness, and asks if it's ever truly possible to come home again.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJan 21, 2014
    ISBN9780062268303
    Carthage: A Novel
    Author

    Joyce Carol Oates

    Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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    Reviews for Carthage

    3.5/5

    125 ratings8 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Started off very good, then went on and on and on ? swamping important and interesting themes in too much of everything.
    • 2/5
      I am struggling to want to finish this novel, Cartage. I felt this was too wordy. Using stream of consciousness in some places, and a narrative voice in others, this novel is told in many different voices. Which is usually fine by me, but this novel made it seem like there was way too much going on, under the surface. It annoyed me too much to finish it. From what little I've gotten through, there seems to be there's no growth, there's too little depth for any of the characters.

      Certain points of the novel are reasonably interesting, yet as I search my mind to find something that stood out to me as particularly good, I come up with nothing. I could not connect to any of the characters, because despite the highly emotional content of the story, they all felt flat, cold, almost like caricatures of people in their situation, dulled down and made inaccessible. the most interesting part of the story was not at all handled, and the rest of it was an incredible boring build up to it. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I've never before read a Joyce Carol Oates book, and maybe her writing style is consistent throughout her works so those already familiar with her, and that like her, will not be bothered by it. I never felt that I could get into a rhythm while reading.
      The characters, especially Cressida, are wholly unlikeable. I don't mind a good anti-hero or conflicted protagonist, but I honestly wanted to throw Cressida in the damn river myself. The fact that Cressida was so self-absorbed, so completely unable to comprehend the feelings of anyone other than herself, & so downright cruel to her "friends" and her sister and her parents and mankind in general because she thought herself so special and so different made me not care one iota about her. The fact that she would take the actions she did because people don't love her enough (in her own estimation) made me just hate her. All of this resulted in suffering through the book about her.
      Oates also repeats the same information over and over, especially during the first 250 pages or so. I desperately wanted the story to move forward, but I was subjected to reading the same. exact. information. for what felt like an eternity before anything happened again in the story. I just don't think I can bring myself to finish the novel, even though I'm not even halfway through.

      Overall, I was very disappointed in this book, and it's possible this has turned me off to Oates as an author. Some people obviously love her and have nothing but high praise for this book, but this one is just not my cup of tea.

      *Edit: I finally finished this novel, 4 hours after writing this review. I admit, I skimmed the repetitive parts very quickly, and only read he parts I found interesting....I am somewhat glad about the ending, and yet not. I still dislike Cressida intensely, regardless of how repentant she feels. The storyline went back and forth, from boring to semi-interesting. I'm still not sure if I will ever read another novel by J.c.o., unless her style and storyline are vastly different. I still don't understand all the 5 star reviews, either. I think I only finished the novel out of a complete boredom, and an even stronger, perverse desire to see if Cressida learned anything from her mistakes, and realized all the lives she's ruined or not. Somehow, I truly doubt it.

      2.5 stars
    • 4/5
      This novel was a bit of a muddle for me, at times so, so good and at others, painfully labored. It's about a missing girl and the effect of her disappearance on her family and the accused perpetrator. That's the surface story anyway. Deeper, it's an exploration of alienation and misperception, and about the dark currents often flowing just below placid surfaces. Oates' characters are both sympathetic and infuriating, their actions and motivations perfectly understandable at times and completely inscrutable at others. It's this kind of complexity that I loved, despite my struggle with some parts of the book.
    • 4/5
      I felt like this book took me forever to read. The fist half of the book I had trouble finding a character that was likable. It wasn't until the last several chapters that I could really find any redemption for them. Joyce Carol Oates is a master at exploring the darkness of humanity.
    • 3/5
      An overly long examination of what happens to the family and friends and victim when a teenage girl goes missing.
    • 4/5
      Very, very long because you are seeing the story from several points of view and yes, they are all different and Joyce Carol Oates is a master of detail. I was listening to this while I was working on something else---I'm not sure I would have finished it if I had been reading it.
    • 4/5
      In the small Adirondacks town of Carthage, New York, 19-year-old Cressida Mayfield goes missing. The prime suspect in her disappearance is a severely wounded Iraq war veteran who happens to be her older sister's fiance. I don't want to say much more about the plot, because it's twisty enough that every time you think you've got a hold on something or someone, it turns out you don't.

      I love how Joyce Carol Oates takes a fiction genre and plays around with it until it is more than the sum of its parts, while remaining completely respectful of the genre she is borrowing. Here, the whodunit aspect is legitimately suspenseful, but the reader's attention is more strongly drawn to the the seething emotions of the characters. I didn't quite know what to make of Cressida - is she on the autism spectrum or not? - but I was drawn to her in all her brittle unlikability.

      It's an odd book. It's dark. Joyce seems to delight in confounding the reader! I do have to wonder about all the exclamation points and italics. They seem to be an Oates trademark, but in this book they really struck me.
    • 4/5
      I have never read this author but she came highly recommended from a friend. I loved the book, although the middle section that was relevant but at times too detailed and long. The book is dark and the main characters not that likable, if fact I'm not sure I really "liked" for any of the characters.Despite this, I read the book straight through and if has left me thinking. That's a compliment!
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