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Should I Read On?

I bought a memoir by Joyce Carol Oates not long ago.

File:JoyceCarolOates.jpg

Why? Well ... I knew her name. She has a considerable reputation as a novelist. I had never read any of her novels, and thought this might be a way to sample her abilities.

It was a mistake. As noted in the first sentence above, the book I bought, A Widow's Story is not a novel. It is a memoir. And it is a thoroughly depressing memoir about her husband's death and the early months of life alone after a happy marriage of decades.

This passage, from early on in the book, represents about as far as I managed to get before giving up.

-------------------------------- 

Your husband's heartbeat has accelerated -- we haven't been able to stabilize it -- in the event that his heart stops do you want extraordinary measures to be used to keep him alive?

I am so stunned that I can't reply, the stranger at the other end of the line repeats his astonishing words -- I hear myself stammering Yes! Yes of course -- gripped by disbelief, panic, stammering Yes anything you can do!

-----------------------------

Question: should I continue?

Of course she has my sympathy. But reading hundreds of more pages of that doesn't sound like an effective way to express my sympathy.



I already bought the book, so the widow Oates will get a small piece of change from me after various middlemen take their share.

Her writing of this book may have helped her work her way through her pain but, again, that is not a reason for me to read it all.

If there is something extraordinary coming out of this, some uplift, perhaps, or some brilliant stylistic innovations in prose ... well, somebody please tell me about it and I'll continue.

Otherwise I think I'll leave the rest of this one be.
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