Childwold
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 First edition | |
| Author | Joyce Carol Oates |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | novel |
| Publisher | Vanguard Press |
Publication date | 1976 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 295 |
| ISBN | 978-0814907771 |
Childwold is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates first published in 1976 by Vanguard Press.[1][2]
Childwold's narrative and characters bear similarities to Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel Lolita.[3]
"[T]he action centers around a writer named Kasch whose infatuation with a fourteen-year-old girl, Laney Bartlett, and his subsequent attraction and engagement with her mother, Arlene, ends abruptly when he kills Arlene's former lover, Earl Tuller."[4]
Reception
New York Times literary critic Josephine Gattuso Hendin ranks Childwold as the best of Oates's novels to date.[5] Praising the "verbal brilliance" that characterizes irs writing, Hendin adds this caveat:
[T]he novel's major flaw is exactly an almost superhuman, torrential flow of words that washes out the individual voice and often makes it difficult to tell who is saying what. The rapid-fire flashbacks that open the novel are its least effective part, offering little more than jumbled scenes of violence recollected with nostalgia.[6]