Oates's KO

Another stunner

YOU Must Remember This is an Amrican masterpiece.

—JAMES ATLAS

Joyce Carol Oates is so prolific that reviewers throw up their hands in despair. But why punish a writer for writing? Her persistence has finally paid off. From the blunt imperative of its title to its last astounding page, You Must Remember This (E. P. Dutton) is a triumph. The story of a troubled, intense young girl who falls in love with her uncle, a washed-up boxer, Oates's sprawling novel is the definitive history of an era: America in the 1950s. The working-class family she conjures up, the down-atthe-heels industrial city they inhabit, the world of housing projects, crummy taverns, of factory grit and urban decay, are both deeply imagined and utterly real. Oates spares no detail: in the background, the McCarthy hearings flicker on the new Philco television sets; Eisenhower makes bland pronouncements; people theorize about U.F.O.s. Deeper in the background: bomb shelters, nuclear tests, the dawn of the atomic age. The beginning of the end.

Oates has written this novel as if in a trance, from deep within the consciousness of her many characters: fathers and sons, daughters and mothers, a crowd of minor voices dwelling on their stifled lives. You Must Remember This is an American masterpiece.

JAMES ATLAS