Joyce Carol Oates - Beasts - Review

This intense and brilliantly written novella by America's most prolific author in the last fifty years strikes with tasteful subtlety to the darker aspects of human nature. The text, too, is also an examination of exploitation and seduction, used by those in a position of power and authority the opportunity to satisfy their perverse desires.

One is reminded that education and 'class' has nothing to do with morality. The Nazi SS, for example, would drink expensive wine, listening to recordings of Mozart and Schubert while Jews mercilessly burned, just outside their windows. Education and good breeding do not equate to living an ethically good life. As history has shown, Plato was wrong. Evil is a separate issue to education; it presents in many forms... 

Beasts is a provocative tale about an inexperienced university student in the seventies who falls in love with her literature professor - an arrogant, bohemian literary type, that vomits clichés about the works of D.H. Lawrence and Fredric Nietzsche, but to a young girl, opens whole new vistas to the world of literature.

The professor is also married to an unconventional French artist whose derivative, aboriginal/erotic sculptures have caused violent responses from the town folk's middle-class sensibilities. This couple is unique relative to their surroundings, which draw hungry, inexperienced adolescent schoolgirls' into their elite though sordid lair. What scintillating and dark pleasures reside within their mysterious domain?

I've always believed that the mark of a good writer is the ability to communicate sensational subject matter in quiet, understated prose, thereby doubling the effect on the unsuspecting reader. Oates's control of her art form is clearly expressed in Beasts; she combines Gothic nuances with psychological insight and makes you believe every word.

Excellent reading.