Re: JCO: falls/mom

Hi,

Not to intrude, but I've had two occasions to listen to Joyce discuss her most recent work in person.  From her comments, sincerely and thoughtfully delivered, as always, I can't buy into parody.  She views the work as deeply and intensely personal. (The book is, as we know, dedicated to her own late mother.)  Says she seriously entertained the idea of publishing it under yet another pseudonym.  She thought it might have appeal only to her female fans, though that feeling was almost immediately disproven.  As a male, I found her notion strangely disquieting, especially since I find myself deeply connected to the experience and feelings that Nikki Eaton undergoes.  I remember being in the living room with my mother when she had an infarction and I believed, at the time, that she had abruptly passed on (not true, then.) Joyce's descriptions of Nikki discovering Gwen's body in the garage brought everything flooding back as though it were yesterday. 

 

I'm about halfway through a first reading and I find the book gripping on a personal level.

 

It seems not to have the epic, mythological quality we associate with some of Joyce's most important works - e.g. Blonde, the recent The Falls.  If there is an attempt on JCO's part to create that level, I think it not too successful, but as a personal "fictionalized" recording of experience and feeling, it succeeds brilliantly (for me).  Curiously, the last book I read of Joyce's was Freaky Green Eyes (which I'm considering using in my classroom) and there are some wonderful parallels to be drawn between Franky and Nikki in the wake (no pun) of their mothers' deaths.

 

More to come when I finish the book in a day or so.