Todd’s Peek In Review: “Solstice” by Joyce Carol Oates, A Novel to Surrender Two

 Some writers send us alarming, unrealistic signals when they write.  Joyce Carol Oates, as a writer does just the opposite for me, she makes everything seem relative to the context of understanding we all live in.  That always points to the need for relationship and understanding between two people, as in Solstice, this novel to surrender two.  The story is about the developing relationship between two women, who need each other as friends and lovers.  However, there is an effusive quality to their relationship which makes their love for each other difficult to pinpoint, as impelling and compelling to the need for one another. Monica Jensen and Sheila Trask are the sole protagonists of the novel to surrender two, needing to be grounded in love, past, present and future with themselves, as told in this hauntingly beautiful novel.

Joyce Carol Oates is a telling author.  She has the gift for sharing emotional content in the quality of her writing. What is so telling and so beautiful about Joyce Carol Oates is the emotive quality to her work, and specifically to the way she uses her own emotive  style of writing to portray and depict the characters in her novels.  As the basis also for the story and the story lines of each novel, she shows us time and time again how the characterization of  her writings are so important to the meaning and content to each novel. 

That is what the novel Solstice is all about.  For Solstice is not to be simplified but to be imagined by the joys and heartaches in this novel as adage, To Surrender Two.  The basis of understanding to the novel is both Monica Jensen and Sheila Trask are interesting women with  evolving lives.  Monica has accepted a teaching position in a small rural town in PA and Sheila Trask is a brilliant artist, who has lived in the community for quite some time.  They both have previously been married to men, Monica Jensen is divorced and Sheila Trask is a widow, having been married to a very eccentric and demanding artist. Each woman is alluring and beautiful on all fronts: spiritually, emotionally and on the physical side of life.  They are also exemplary women, with true feminism as their own point of view in action and content. They are totally captivated by one another and that is how the story enfolds and develops with the definitive poignancy to the characterization of both Monica Jensen and Sheila Trask.  This is backdrop to my need in surrendering two, in to the beauty of this story and Joyce Carol Oates’ writings, that is!

To read this love story is to read Solstice by two.  For these women are so beautiful in their own rite. Their rite of passage, that is; in making their meeting become such a telling emotive process to read on about  and to discern for yourselves.  The book is available at the Center.  Don’t miss out on Joyce Carol Oates, as a writer and novelist for our generation and future generation to come by. Because it is in this telling, evocative style and how that reading of Solstice is for you; that opens my heart as a reader to not only the story itself, but to the love between Monica Jensen and Sheila Trask. In seeing their needs as women enfold, we see their ongoing, mutual sense of attraction, as Solstice by two, a novel to surrender two in my estimation. For the love of God and her novel, Solstice, this September Review 2010, Ciao, Todd