The Rise of Life on Earth

By Joyce Carol Oates

Book Overview

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the most notable books of 1991, Joyce Carol Oates's The Rise of Life on Earth is a memorable portrait of one of the "insulted and injured" of American society. Set in the underside of working-class Detroit of the '60s and '70s, this short, lyric novel sketches Kathleen Hennessy's violent childhood--shattered by a broken home, child-beating, and murder--and follows her into her early adult years as a hospital health-care worker. Overworked, underpaid, and quietly overzealous, Kathleen falls in love with a young doctor, whose exploitation of her sets the course of the remainder of her life, in which her passivity masks a deep fury and secret resolve to take revenge.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811212130
• ISBN13: 9780811212137
• Release Date: September 1992
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 142 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Women on the Edge: From Fetching to Retching

The more I read of Joyce Carol Oates, the more I get drawn in by her tales of women on the edge. We have all seen women like Kathleen Hennessy. When you look at them with the eyes half-closed, they are almost fetching if you are feeling somewhat peckish; but alpha males just continue scanning for more promising material. (If the preceding sentence strikes you as callous, you may be wound up too tight to read this book.) That Oates can take seemingly unpromising material like Kathleen Hennessy and, while being true to her subject, manages to show that, for many, life on earth hasn't risen far enough. The daughter of an abusive father and a runaway mother, Kathleen finds herself in a series of foster homes in the Detroit area, growing up hoping to become a nurse but ending up as a nurse's aide. She manages to attract a young physician named Orson Abbott, but the relationship progresses no further than her pregnancy.Without giving away the ending, I can only say that Kathleen's solution to her problem is simple, methodical, and great material for a supermarket tabloid spread. In fact, certain events occur almost in passing that would make for a great cover story in the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.Oates is second only to Anton Chekhov in her ability to take a seemingly uncomplicated person and show us depths we had never before imagined. Why, I wonder, is she not given the honor she deserves? I think many readers take her for granted because she is so prolific and writes mostly about women. Duh, so did Jane Austen!

Dark, unsettling, though provoking

This book, in the Gothic-Oatsian tradition, follows an trod-upon product of our society--yes, a female. Beaten nearly to death by her alcoholic father--in the same beating, her sister was killed--our "protagonist" decides she wants to be a nurse during her two week hospital recovery. She half-meets this dream by becoming a nurses aide, but she never makes a full emotional recovery. Another key event keeps her anger just beneath the surface to errupt when it seems safe for her to do so. This books twists through some small, dark avenues and ends on a scene that is unforgettable, grotesque, and devastating.

A case history of abuse and indifference

One of America's finest authors, Joyce Carol Oates turns her attention to the story of nurse's aide Kathleen Hennessy and the cycle of abuse and indifference that dominates her life. Orphaned at a young age when her father is imprisoned for her little sister's death, Kathleen grows up quiet and seemingly untouchable in a series of inhospitable environments whiledisaster waits at every turn. Kathleen is an archetype of the cowed young woman: possessing little enough intelligence, not really much given to introspection, lacking any confidence or self-esteem, able to learn what she is taught by breaking everything down into simple tasks, but never really seeing the big picture. Naturally men take advantage of her, but Kathleen won't let their degradations affect her calm demeanor. What she doesn't see is how living without love has warped her own personality. Again and again we see her lashing out at the innocent because she can't bring herself to confront the people who are really offending her.Oates avoids melodrama in this powerful story by describing everything - even the most graphically gruesome scenes - in a very objective, detached, one could say clinical, narrative voice. Kathleen breaks these too into sequences of small but individual events so that she can more easily control, or ignore, or perhaps justify, the suffering that seems to permeate her entire world. We find ourselves wanting to forgive even her most wanton acts because we recognize how little she really understands of human kindness, never having experienced much of it. The world is full of women like Kathleen, who have been born into pain and violence, and who have no hope of ever understanding anything else. In this grim and almost gothic novel, Joyce Carol Oates weeps for those for whom life on Earth is not a rise, but a fall. This is not a pleasant book - most readers will be shocked, disgusted, or at the very least depressed by it, but the author clearly has tried to make a real difference in how we perceive the quiet, solitary, seemingly dispassionate woman who lives next door.

great novella

oates writes a really good short novel about a girl whose life turns her into something both chilling and sympathetic. oates has a bit of an experimental style with her massive sentences and some odd structures late in the story. it's definitely not your regular book.

Beautifully written, fully realized characters

This novel has haunted me since I first read it several years ago. With exquisite prose Joyce Carol Oates achieves, once again, a gritty realism that expresses so many of the hidden textures of our lives. I don't know how she does it but her character, Kathleen, comes to life like a trick you can't explain. By that I mean a reader doesn't get caught up in her writing style or any sort of convention; it just IS. And that's what makes the best JCO writing worth reading.