Bellefleur

A wealthy and notorious clan, the Bellefleurs live in a region not unlike the Adirondacks, in an enormous mansion on the shores of mythic Lake Noir. They own vast lands and profitable businesses, they employ their neighbors, and they influence the government. A prolific and eccentric group, they include several millionaires; a mass murderer; a spiritual seeker who climbs into the mountains looking for God; a wealthy noctambulist who dies of a chicken scratch. This is the saga of the weird, sometimes immensely rich Bellefleur family over several generations, a story focused mainly on Gideon Bellefleur and his power-mad, somewhat psychic, very beautiful wife Leah, their three children (one of them extremely psychic) and the servants and relatives, living and dead, who inhabit the castle and its environs. It's a story of the world's changeableness, of time and eternity, space and soul, pride and physicality versus love. Bellefleur is a medieval allegory of caritas versus cupiditas, love and selflessness versus pride and selfishness. The central symbol of the novel is change, baffling complexity, mystery. Written with a voluptuousness and immediacy unusual even for Oates, Bellefleur is widely regarded as one of her masterworks. As the incomparable John Gardner wrote in his contemporaneous review, "By one two-page thunderstorm she makes the rest of us novelists wonder why we left the farm. How strange the play of light and shadow in her graveyards! How splendid the Bellefleurs' decaying mansion! How convincing and individual the characters are--and so many of them! ... We're forced to ask again how anyone can possibly write such books, such absolutely convincing scenes, rousing in us, again and again, the familiar Oates effect, the point of all her art: joyful terror gradually ebbing toward wonder."