Joyce Oates –
Zeno Mayfield, a former mayor of the small Adirondack town of Carthage, and his wife, Arlette, have two daughters. Juliet is as good as she is beautiful. Cressida is “difficult.” Smart, spiky, gnomish, and artistic, “inky-frizzy haired” Cressida may be autistic. Sweet Juliet gets engaged to handsome, civic-minded Brett Kincaid, who promptly enlists after 9/11. He returns severely injured, horribly scarred, and deeply traumatized. Then Cressida disappears, and grief decimates her loving family. Flashbacks to Brett’s hellish experiences in Iraq carry a powerful indictment of war crimes, while a harrowing visit to a maximum-security prison by an enigmatic investigative writer exposes the horrors of incarceration and capital punishment. Oates’ eerie, plangent, and gripping tale of a missing 19-year-old outcast and a betrayed warrior pivots on her interpretations of Cressida’s medieval namesake, who abandoned one soldier for another, and Zeno’s paradox concerning “infinity within the finite” as “a state of perpetual yearning.”
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