All The Varieties Of Love And Madness, On Display In 'Carthage'
Certainly that's what Carthage, Oates' latest novel, brings to mind. Here, as in many of her other works of fiction, we encounter an American family in torment, in a small town in the wilds of upstate New York, people from whose turmoil and suffering we can learn a great deal about our own households and our own hearts. The town is Carthage, the wilds are the Nautauga Forest Preserve — "three hundred thousand acres of mountainous, boulder-strewn and densely wooded wilderness ... remote, uninhabitable and unreachable except by the most intrepid hikers and mountain climbers." And the family is the Mayfields — Zeno, the husband (a former mayor of the town), wife Arlette, and daughters Juliet and Cressida, whom Oates describes as "like the daughters of a fairy-tale king." All of them are caught up in the narrative of a disappearing girl and Brett Kincaid, Juliet's fiance, the Iraq War veteran who has returned to Carthage wounded in body and soul.
When the younger Mayfield girl, Cressida — a slight, rather androgynous creature who dropped out of college and returned home — incongruously throws herself at the wounded Brett, whatever glue seemed to hold the family together melts in the heat of violence. The police find Brett unconscious in his blood-spattered vehicle in the local forest preserve, and Cressida goes missing. The authorities decide Cressida's been murdered — a crime to which dazed and wounded veteran Brett confesses — and a huge search ensues.
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