This One Book

I've slowly been working my way through Joyce Carol Oates' Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart for the past three months. This book feels impenetrable. I am a big fan of Oates. We even share the same birthday. She is such a prolific and exacting writer that I find myself often overwhelmed by the craft of her work. I've read four other books in tandem with Oates' because I am finding that I constantly need a break from her tight construction. But I love it. I was only to page nine when I got hung up on this sentence:

"And a shiver walks over them another time."

This is a paragraph of its own and stills my breath every time I read it. It's not a "chill," it's a "shiver." It doesn't "get them," it "walks over them." And it doesn't walk over them "again," but "another time." The shiver is visible, tangible. It has dozens of legs and leaves its mark when walking over "them." This sentence slows you down, as a reader, forces you to visualize every word as a separate picture, then encourages you to combine them together to make the whole. It's an added bonus that the sentence is eerie enough to give the reader shivers as well.

Another sentence, or part of a sentence, that caught my eye, is on page 143. Jinx Fairchild is watching his father play checkers with himself -- watching him control the blacks and reds simultaneously, and Oates' describes it as:

" . . . a peace to the wettish air like the hush of fresh bread cooling."

This sentence fragment has nearly everything: touch/feel (the wettish air), sound (the hush), smell (the fresh bread cooling), not to mention the fact that Oates even thought of comparing something, anything, to the "hush of fresh bread cooling." But, indeed, it is a hush, a lingering hush that is as easily smelled as wettish air is felt.

I'm starting on my thesis this semester. I have my book list picked out (mostly poetry), but I think I need to get this book in there as well if for no other reason than the exactness and beauty of the language.