USA TODAY International Edition
Abortion divides two families in ‘ Martyrs’
Joyce Carol Oates’ new novel couldn’t be more timely
It is difficult to imagine a more auspicious arrival than Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, A Book of American Martyrs. The provocative portrait of two families on opposite sides of America’s abortion debate is befitting the times in more ways than one.
Oates’ carefully orchestrated tale ( Ecco, 752 pp., eeee out of four) lands not only as President Trump’s inauguration revives uncertainty over a woman’s right to choose, but also as the country navigates a virulent cultural divide that has rendered many incapable of empathy for those across the rift.
Luther Dunphy, a zealous evangelical Christian, believes he is acting out God’s will when he murders Gus Voorhees, an abortion doctor in his Ohio town and a fierce champion of women’s reproductive rights. To capture each man’s righ- teous complexity, Oates’ story shifts back and forth in time and among several narrators, the most absorbing of whom are Naomi Voorhees and Dawn Dunphy, the men’s eldest daughters.
Before the assassination, the clans could not appear more different. The Dunphys are devout, working- class and pro- life. The Voorheeses are secular, highly educated and pro- choice. But Oates’ story reveals how the anguished families, linked by trage- dy, parallel one another in the tumultuous years after the murder.
Both mothers are ravaged by grief, their children plump with vengeance.
In each family, some members withdraw, repelled by their kin, while others grasp desperately for connection. Neither Jenna Voorhees nor Edna Mae Dunphy is emotionally accessible to her children. Both families grapple with how Luther, the supplicant, and Gus, the idealist, sealed their fates in pursuit of noble lives.
Oates’ American saga captivates because it exists within a drama playing out across the country. Morality has never felt less fixed, the martyr never more subjective. Oates’ prose is imbued with tumbling sentences and wandering constructions, a style that naturally fits with the narrative’s ethical entanglements. ( Though some may find her penchant for the parenthetical disorienting.)
Naomi is a perceptive protagonist as she struggles to piece together filaments of her father’s life, but the novel’s best passages follow Dawn: plain- faced, “defiantly sexless” with feet that “held the grip of the earth firm as hooves.” Wounded and awkward and an inveterate under- performer, Dawn charms through naiveté.
Thrilling pages chronicle her journey to becoming a professional boxer, and vivid fight scenes of the oafish novice, who anoints herself “The Hammer of Jesus,” are as tense as the assassination itself. “Cries of the crowd like the shrieks of rapacious birds,” Oates writes of Dawn’s first fight.
Martyrs is a graceful and excruciating story of two families who do not live very far apart, but exist in different realities. The tragedy is not the gruesome death of Gus Voorhees, but the ease with which the families brand one another as enemies.
The saga ends neatly, which may seem incompatible with the moral ambiguity of the previous 700 pages, but it appears, to this reader at least, a gesture of kindness. Hope amid horror.