I'll Take You There

By Joyce Carol Oates

Book Overview

"Anellia" is a young student who, though gifted with a penetrating intelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession. Funny, mordant, and compulsive, she falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive black philosophy student. But she is tested most severely by a figure out of her past she'd long believed dead.

Astonishingly intimate and unsparing, and pitiless in exposing the follies of the time, I'll Take You There is a dramatic revelation of the risks--and curious rewards--of the obsessive personality as well as a testament to the stubborn strength of a certain type of contemporary female intellectual.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060501189
• ISBN13: 9780060501181
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 290 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

One of the best books I have ever read!

This is the first book I have read of Joyce Carol Oates. Now, I want to read all of her books. Her language is so... beautiful. If you are a reader that likes "deep" books, you should definitely read this one. The story takes place in a University in upstate New York during the 60s. The narrator of the book is an 18-year-old girl, whose real name you never know through out the book, though she likes to call herself "Anellia" sometimes . There's three parts to the book. The first part is when she joins a sorority, full of rich, popular, pretty girls. But "Anellia" is poor and geeky, who looks like a 13-year-old even though she is 18. The second part of the book is when she falls in love with a black philosophy student, who is hesitant at first to let "Anellia", who is white, know and love him. The third part of the book, which I think is the best part of the book, is when she discovers that someone who she thought was dead is not. I loved this book. I think Joyce Carol Oates is gonna be my second favorite author.{John O'hara is my 1st.} It is great for adults, and teenagers who like adult books.{I am a teenager} It is the kind of book that you'll think about for a while after you finish reading it. But if you are a person who likes "trashy" books with lots of sex scenes and stuff, look somewhere else.

Of Love and Truth

This is a book about love: The narrator tells us about her attempts to belong. She wants to belong to the sorority, be one of those smooth, lovable girls - but all too soon she realizes that this cannot be: she's different. Maybe this feeling of being different from the "normal" people around her attracts her to the graduate student Vernor, although she falls in love with his clever voice before she sees his African American face. Vernor hates himself; he is drawn to philosophy because it seems to be a spiritual realm untainted with self; so it is no wonder that he cannot accept the narrator's love. The narrator's family seems to be devoid of love. Her mother died shortly after the narrator was born, who finds herself accused of being the one to blame for her mother's death. Her father, brothers, grandparents are taciturn, elusive strangers; and yet... This powerful novel shows how you create yourself, trying to be who you want to be; at the same time it proves that there are basics - roots? - from which you cannot escape. Oates is a master at evoking physical and spiritual reality. The reader can smell the nightmare of the sorority house; the physical encounters with Vernor are so shocking because they are so real. Maybe some readers' judgments are clouded by their expectations which come from reading other novels by Joyce Carol Oates. This is the first novel by her I have read, and I am deeply impressed by her mastery of the English language, by the beautiful rhythms and vivd descriptions which reminded me of Woolf and Mansfield.

Oates is Fabulous, Again

I have to start off this review by admitting that I love Joyce Carol Oates. There is something wonderful, entrancing about the rhythm of her prose that is again present in I'll Take You There. Her writing is always so wonderfully evocative and almost hypnotic. Her characters, in particular the nameless narrator if I'll Take You There, are all trapped in something they cannot see, but which Oates lets us see all too well. In I'll Take You There, the narrator, a young college woman in the early 60s is desperately trying to fit it and although at times she succeeds, that success is only external. Internally, for some reason she perceives herself as a loser, a misfit. She tries first to fit in with a sorority and when that doesn't work out, she undertakes a relationship with a African American graduate student about ten years her senior. Neither of these "relationships" are right for the narrator for reasons she sees, but for some reason ignores. She is a complex and at times frustrating protagonist, yet Oates keeps you reading. I enjoyed this book very much, but I will say that if you are not an Oates fan, this novel will not change your mind. Oates fans, on the other hand, should enjoy this one completely.

Between one and none there lies an infinity

In the mid 1970's, The Staple Singers had a hit song with "I'll Take You There." The latest Joyce Carol Oates novel shares that title. But whereas, Mavis Staple sings of enlightenment through religion and finding a passage to God and redemption, a "Stairway to Heaven" as it were, Oates sets her novel in a scholarly,philosophical milieu: in a place and among those who have a definite take on we humans and our place in the cosmos. A place that is decidedly non religious. Philosophers like Spinoza, Pascal and Locke are by nature the questioners as well as the suppliers of answers. This is the nature of Philosophical thought. And even though it may sound like Oates has written a treatise on Philosophy, she has not for with "I'll Take You There" Oates is back in her old stomping grounds of Obsession, unrequited love and passion unrewarded and unrecognized. As Anellia, our lead character says: "I was possessed by the wayward passion of one to whom passion is unknown; denied, and thwarted..."Anellia (this is what she calls herself and her real name is never revealed), is a an extremely bright and unsophisticated young woman who secures a scholarship to a college in "Upstate New York," and proceeds to throw herself headfirst into college life. Anellia is remarkably ill equipped emotionally and socially to be away from her family much less a member of a sorority,but when she is asked to join Kappa Gamma Pi she jumps at the chance to be part of a "family" and to have sisters who she hopes will fill a void in her life ("...I yearned for sisters: I reasoned that I'd had the others: mother, father, brothers, grandparents...sisters! I would be happy forever, I think."). Anellia fakes it for as long as she can but sorority life is not for her: "My Kappa self did not brood, was never melancholy...she had clear skin, shining eyes, a glossy pageboy and lipsticked lips. She was no one I knew personally, but an inspired composite of a dozen Kappa girls..."As with most of Oates' characters in many of her novels, Anellia is obsessed with food: "...it was the caterers cartons that caught my eye, the aftermath of Saturday night parties, leftover canapés, caviar jars where always caviar remained...sometimes I devoured these food where I stood, sometimes I stuffed them into my duffel bag to carry away...sometimes, stricken with remorse or fear of food poisoning, I threw everything away. I saw no contradiction with my ideal and my animal self. As Spinoza said, "We yearn to persist in our being."' In another instance, Anellia says:"...my mouth watered with saliva like rushing churning ants."In the second section of the novel, "The Negro Lover," Anellia finds love and romance with one Vernor Matheius a PhD candidate in Philosophy:"...I'd fallen in love with a man's mere voice; not a radiant idea as I'd imagined but a physical condition, like grief."As with most things for Anellia, love does not prove to be a panacea as she spends weeks stalking Vernor before he notices and s

Arriving Where She Needs To Be

I'll Take You There is a story divided into three sections concerning crucial stages of a girl's development and narrated in the first person by the girl, Anellia, herself. This is the same structure Joyce Carol Oates uses in her 1986 novel Marya: A Life though the stories of the two novels differ in some crucial elements. The first section, The Penitent, is primarily concerned with Anellia's torturous time spent in a sorority called Kappa Gamma Pi and her relationship with the foreboding and ultimately tragic English headmistress Mrs. Agnes Thayer. Her entrance into the sorority sparked by a timid desire to gain acceptance from her peers, gradually reveals the shallow nature of the sisters and the vacuous symbols of their elite collective. The second section, The Negro Lover, explores Anellia's complex relationship with brilliant and troubled Vernor Matheius. Her obsession with the philosophy student blooms into a tumultuous relationship based on passion that is stirred by feelings of alienation. Each of them are fiercely intelligent and trapped by a societal definition based on the exterior that they cannot escape. But unlike Vernor, Anellia embraces this identity distinction, her Jewish heritage, in order to exile herself from the repugnant normality she has discovered. The third and slightest section, The Way Out, finds Anellia extracted from the developmental struggle of university and unexpectedly driven to a reunion with her estranged father. As he is slowly dying, she develops a relationship with his caregiver and fiancee Hildie. The feelings of opportunities lost and emotions wasted are gradually excavated over their time together as they come to terms with losing a man who will always remain an aloof mystery.This novel is brewing with complex ideas all delicately arranged around an intricate plot. The sections of the novel could stand quite independently from each other. But together they draw an intriguing picture of Anellia's development and her discovery of the woman she wants to become. The frame she has set around her life is designed to mollify her qualms with existence but it is also a trap that limits the freedom of her individuality. The language she composes to liberate herself is also an unbearable burden. This is revealed in the telling line: "In fear I seemed to be plucking at, with childish fingers, a consolation of philosophy." Anellia's relationship with Vernor is akin to an artist gazing upon her muse, drawing inspiration and guidance to create an artwork, an identity for herself. Unhesitating in her confrontation of the troubles of racial relations as Oates always is, the denial of the language which defines Vernor's color provokes the collapse of any true connection between them. This, paired with Vernor's own inability to divert from the path he has limited himself to, makes their coupling wildly antagonistic and dangerous.It is significant that Oates has dedicated this novel to Gloria Vanderbilt, the visual artist,