“You Must Remember This” by Joyce Carol Oates

Last month, I wrote that I’d not yet finished this novel about the relationship between fifteen year old Enid and her thirtiesh ex-boxer uncle, Felix. This one I finished.

The novel is astonishingly well written, from several characters’ points of view. Joyce Carol Oates can get away with being wordy better than most anybody, and though I did eventually tire of the beautiful, long narratives, the relationships and the inner lives of Enid and Felix and Lyle, Enid’s father, are told so masterfully that the book held me.

Ms. Oates does her research and then some, and YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS, her eighteenth novel, reflects her vast knowledge in its accounts of the tumultous nineteen forties and fifties. From the detailed descriptions of the boxing champions of the day, the paranoia over “the bomb” and the subsequent panic-driven building of home shelters, the Adlai Stevenson campaign, the Army-McCarthy hearings, to the croonings and commentary of  Peggy Lee and Arthur Godfrey, I was immersed in a time I barely remember as a child, but about which I’ve heard and read volumes.

And the “affair” between the young girl and the older, failed boxer—Eloquently written, with “dangerous, not okay” woven all through the story without ever stating it. We see the damage wreaked on Enid, and I thought, several times, of the Me Too movement, and how the novel’s depiction of a “consensual” relationship that is really not consensual at all, given Enid’s tender age and lack of experience, shows a level of predatory behavior not as easily categorized, but clearly wrong.

I found the ending of  YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS unsatisfying, and I felt let down by the lack of closure. But the rest of the book was so good that I highly recommend it. Joyce Carol Oates is brilliant, and it’s fascinating to explore her worlds.

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