A Review

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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 The 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. 

The 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, Aria, where, unknowingly pregnant with her last child, she falls asleep at a park bench and her son runs off with his little brother in the stroller to face the falls. Aria wakes up to police officers alerting her that her children had gone out in a dangerous way. Through the entire sequence you’re not made to feel as though the boys will die by accident. Instead, you’re meant to wonder if the pull of The Falls will be strong enough for the little boy to willingly give up his life, 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 ever borrowed, and that the river, ever more powerful than we will ever be, was never impressed by any of us to begin with.