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 A Garden of Earthly Delights
by Joyce Carol Oates
New York: Vanguard, 1967
440 pages
Dust Jacket Blurb
In this stirringly powerful novel, Joyce Carol Oates tells the story of Clara, child of a migrant worker, and the four men who shape her life: Carleton, her father, for whom she is life's only meaning; Lowry, with whom she runs away at fourteen and whose child she bears; Revere, the man she marries and who gives her a name; and Swan, her son, who is devoured by her hunger for possession.
Born into a deprived and grueling world, a world of transience, Clara's only certainty is uncertainty; her only goal, to arrange fate, to wage war on chance and accident. The violence of that war is told by Miss Oates with the compelling fascination that so marks her work. It is a fascination akin to that of the great painting from which the novel's title derives: "The Garden of Earthly Delights" in which the pleasures of the flesh are extolled, but with the full consciousness of their sin; a garden in which sweetness is as devilish as decay.
Miss Oates, whose exceptional talent has already been so widely recognized, depicts her garden with the force of a master.
Excerpt
 . . . There she knelt, heavily, and buried her face in her hands. She was sobbing too and the minister bent over her and let his eyes streak across the pews as if drawing everyone up. "To Jesus! To Jesus!" he whispered loudly.
A man in a yellow sports shirt crawled over another man's legs to get out into the aisle. He was panting and his skin was yellow, like his shirt. Clara began to tremble, thinking everyone was crazy. This man went up to the minister too and knelt, bowing his head sharply. Clara waited to see who would be next. She began to shiver. It was all so strange. Something was happening all around her. In the air around her things seemed to be moving, invisibly bumping against her; was that why everyone was sobbing, out of terror? Why else would you sob if you weren't hurt, except out of terror at being hurt in the future? Her smile jerked into a look of anguish, as if she wanted to sob along with them but could not. Her eyes were dry. Her throat hurt. Those sobs filled the air in a way that the singing had not—the air was crowded and breathless with these sobs of guilty people, and themelody they made was one Clara understood better than she had understood the words of that song.
She understood something then: that these people had done something bad, something wrong, and that they would never get over it.
Other Editions
Revised Edition
New York: Modern Library, 2006
Revised Edition
New York: Modern Library, 2003
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Note
Book 1 of The Wonderland Quartet
Awards
- American Academy of Arts and Letters, Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award
- National Book Award finalist
Reviews
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Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 1967, p525
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Publishers Weekly, May 29, 1967, p62
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Library Journal, June 1, 1967, p2180
- Saturday Review, August 5, 1967, p23-24
- New York Times, September 5, 1967, p41
- New York Times Book Review, September 10, 1967, p5
- Time, September 22, 1967, p106
- Newsweek, October 2, 1967, p93-94
- America, October 21, 1967, p448
- Commonweal, February 23, 1968, p630-631
- Critic, February-March, 1968, p75-76
- Nation, April 1, 1968, p448
- Saturday Review, October 26, 1968
- Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Winter 1969, p188-190
- Southern Review, Winter 1969, p278-279
- Times Literary Supplement, June 4, 1970, p601
- Observer, June 7, 1970, p31
- New Statesman, June 19, 1970, p892
- Guardian Weekly, June 20, 1970, p19
- Spectator, June 20, 1970, p823
- Hudson Review, Spring 1972, p146-150
Reviews of Revised Edition
- New York Times Book Review, April 6, 2003, p31
- Providence Journal-Bulletin, May 11, 2003, pD8
- Sunday Oregonian, June 22, 2003, p. E7
- Washington Post Book World, July 20, 2003, pT12
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Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/novels/garden.html
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