The Internet Book Database of Fiction

#	Date	Publisher	Binding	Cover
1	1985-00-00	Dutton

Blurb:: Monica Jensen is in her late twenties, vulnerable and insecure, not yet over the shock of her recent divorce, a teacher at a boys" private school in rural Pennsylvania. Sheila Trask is in her mid-thirties, the widow of a world-famed sculptor and herself a painter of stature, dominating, fascinating, restless in her need for what or for whom she seems unable to define, even to herself. These two women meet. Drawn to each other, they become friends. Imperceptibly, hardly aware of what is happening to them at the deepest level of feeling, they move, or are moved, toward love, and ultimately beyond it, arriving at last at a near-fatal obsession with each other. Solstice marks Joyce Carol Oates"s return to the contemporary scene after her three famous novels set in the nineteenth century, Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance, and Mysteries of Winterthurn. Very different from those in scale and subject, Solstice resembles them only in the power to capture the reader early and never let go until the final page. It is hard to think of another author, save perhaps D. H. Lawrence, who explores, as Joyce Carol Oates does here, the lives of her characters with so uncanny a response to their erotic tension and psychological entanglement. The result is vivid and disturbing, a signal achievement from one of the most gifted writers of our time.