How can I give this novel five stars when I gave Oates' brilliant The Gravedigger's Daughter five stars? The Falls is a fine, passionate, absorbing, and dark novel but it does not rise to the intense literary level of The Gravedigger's Daughter.

The Falls is basically the story of Ariah Burnaby, nee Littrell, entwined with a fictional early "history" of the Love Canal legal wars, and with Niagara Falls always in the background and often also in the foreground. Ariah's first husband kills himself with a leap into the falls on his wedding night in an incident reminiscent of the disastrous wedding night in McEwan's On Chesil Beach. (Actually it is the other way round since The Falls was published before On Chesil Beach.)

Ariah's second husband, Dirk Burnaby, is a dashing, successful, aristocratic lawyer who has a weakness for damsels in distress. After years of happiness and the arrival of three children, Chandler, Royall, and Juliet, Dirk Burnaby falls for the Lady in Black--Nina Olshaker. The Lady in Black is in distress from the noxious chemicals of Love Canal where she lives--chemicals and polutants dumped there by the chemical companies of Niagara Falls. One of Olshaker's children has died of leukemia and the others are sick. This is all taking place long before the actual Love Canal lawsuits and disaster declarations in the late 1970s and '80s. Without giving away too much let me say that events spiral down when Dirk takes the Olshaker case and drowns in it. Ariah becomes more and more eccentric and isolated as her children mature and bloom in charming ways despite their strangulated family life.

The Falls by Oates is a fascinating and absorbing study of character and social class, and the ways and means of America in the 1950s and `60s especially as instantiated in western Upstate New York. Yes, many of the events portrayed in the novel are improbable or fantastic, but then sometimes is life weirdly surprising. The novel contains many sub-stories and suggestions and events that do not fit and are simply dropped. But, again, life is like that. This is a big, messy, overcooked stew of a novel that's over spiced (I found the few sex scenes to be particularly fulsome). The Falls sprawls and gropes and crawls to sort of a conclusion (opps, sorry for the mixed metaphor).

Oates creates a world, a possible world, with real, living characters. For me, rattling around and exploring that world was absorbing and distracting at least for the eighteen or so hours that the CD version that I listened to commuting took. BTW: The reader, Anna Fields, cannot do a Jewish accent.

It's good to see a big themed novel situated in Niagara Falls, and Joyce Carol Oates, a native of Lockport, the county seat of Niagara County, is the perfect person to provide the look and feel of the area.

The book has two very ambitious themes. The first being marriages/families formed in the 50's and 60's and the other is the danger of stepping outside an entrenched power structure. The City of Niagara Falls and its famous river tie together the themes with imagery of daredevils, tourists, honeymoons, suicides and the general haunting power of the water.

The portrait of Ariah's first marriage, her parents and her second courtship may seem strange to those who hadn't experienced the 1950's. Yes. People were really like that. Ariah's second marriage and her life as a stay at home wife is a little more familiar. Having no interest in her husband's work or about much outside the home, Ariah does not know that her husband is embroiled in major pro bono litigation until an affair with a client is suggested.

In the 70's, as an extension of Ariah's 40's and 50's unexamined life, the generation gap is on display as she undermines her children so they will stay with her. She insults them about their hair and music.

Along with these themes there are side images and scenes which make for a very busy sprawl. I would imagine an editor of a literary icon like Oates would be reluctant to use the delete button but Royall's graveyard scene doesn't belong. There is an overly long portrait of the Stonecrop family. It doesn't seem logical that Chandler would not pursue the knowledge of his mother's first marriage.

This novel starts strong with the first class writing expected of this author. The later parts are often overwritten which detracts from the big themes and the reader ends the book unsatisfied.

I could list many reasons why this was one of the worst books I've read but I've wasted too much of my time on it already.

NO SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW: I picked this up in an airport bookstore on impulse - I'd never read anytihng by Joyce Carol Oates and felt like I ought to read something of hers given her reputation. There were several books by Oates on the shelf but I found that this one had won an award so I purchased it. I started reading it before boarding the plane and over the next 8 hours of delays and flights made it through the first 400 pages.

When I started reading it I was disappointed that this was the book I had read about previously, that began with an awkward wedding night. I remember thinking, when I read reviews of it previously, that I had no interest in it. I probably could have carried returned it and gotten something else but I seldom don't finish a book - its sort of a book reader's version of the Protestant work ethic.

I was captivated by the end of the first chapter. Even if you think you can't really identify with the main characters based on the reviews you have read, you will enjoy this book if you enjoy quality literature and aren't just looking for a mystery that would make a good movie. There isn't one character in it with whom I identify strongly, but the characters are very well developed and like real people, they change as they age and have new experiences.

In "The Falls," Oates has produced a shaggy dog story with about 200 pages of excess fur, characters who don't engage and incidents that don't convince, plus some of the slackest, most cliched writing of her career. It really does seem as though she premised the entire novel on a wondrous opening scene and couldn't figure out where to take it from there.