MUDWOMAN

As far as I am concerned the first great, and maybe it's going to be the greatest, literary event of the year has happened: Joyce Carol Oates's latest novel "Mudwoman" I ordered, has arrived, I have started reading it at once...the narrator's voice is, as ever, like a light that gets sharper and sharper and more conspicuous at every paragraph, there's this sense of increasing force in the narration, a grip that tightens with an absolute determination on a ground reminding of Shakespeare and Eliot and the Greek tragedies. The natural setting splendidly obsessive, clustering and luminous, even if ominous too, like a growing, expanding hum.