The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates

A Review

🎧 Paired Listening — Sea, Swallow Me by Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd

🌊 Acqua Alta — +100 cm (boots on!)

📖 Read facing West on Zattere

There is a particular kind of American mythology built on borrowed grandeur, the idea that if you stand close enough to something vast and eternal, some of that permanence rubs off on you. This sentiment is the death of all in Joyce Carol Oates' slow unraveling novel centered on a fictional Niagara dynasty whose name once meant something along the length of the river. The collapse can be traced back to a decision made by a man who believed he was choosing his fate, but was really joining a long line of fates already chosen by Niagara Falls. What follows is not a classical tragedy but something more like erosion: a sequence of human failures compounding like the roaring of the waves where the falls meet the river below.

Niagara Falls' presence in the novel is like a second protagonist indifferent to the hydroelectric fortunes and tourist economies that have been built, empire-like, around its mist. The book's strongest passages arrive whenever the narrative's domestic scenes intertwine with the falls itself: descriptions of the water's constancy set against the family's disintegration.

There is a scene midway through, an unraveling of the main protagonist throughout, Ariah, where, unknowingly pregnant with her last child, she falls asleep at a park bench and Chandler runs off with Royall in the stroller to face the falls. Ariah wakes up to police officers alerting her that her children had gone out in a dangerous way. Throughout this sequence, the reader does not feel as though the boys will die by some accident involving Niagara Falls, no. Instead, the question becomes whether the magical force of Niagara Falls will be strong enough for the little boy to willingly give up his life to it, and that of his brother's life, too.

The Falls succeeds in its refusal to romanticize inheritance (whether of wealth, name, or natural wonder) as a point of pride. It argues, convincingly, that the things we assume are untouchable are only borrowed, and that the river, more powerful than we will ever be, was never impressed by any of us to begin with.