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.
Bellefleur traces the lives of several generations of this
unusual family. At its center is Gideon Bellefleur and his
imperious, somewhat psychic, very beautiful wife, Leah, their three
children (one with frightening psychic abilities), and the servants
and relatives, living and dead, who inhabit the mansion and its
environs. Their story offers a profound look at the world's
changeableness, time and eternity, space and soul, pride and
physicality versus love. Bellefleur is an allegory of caritas
versus cupiditas, love and selflessness versus pride and
selfishness. It is a novel of change, baffling complexity,
mystery.
Written with a voluptuousness and startling immediacy that
transcends Joyce Carol Oates's early works, Bellefleur is widely
regarded as a masterwork--a feat of literary genius that forces us
"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" (John Gardner).
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