The Falls Book

I read The Falls for book club. I was looking forward to reading it, given its roots in historical events and my past reading of her novel, We Were the Mulvaneys. The Falls was, hands down, the worst novel I have read for years. If I could, I would give it 1/4 of a star. The first few hundred pages are horrid: adjective after adjective describing nothing. The characters are boring, generally unbelievable, and have no depth. To her credit, Joyce Carol Oates offers the reader moments of promise: description of Niagara Falls during the 1950s and the events surrounding the Love Canal lawsuit. Unfortunately, Oates breaks her promise, and instead focuses on the lives of the family members caught up in the time and the lawsuit: members the reader could care less about. I waded (more like skimmed) page after page of this novel for my book club (otherwise I would never have gone beyond page 90) only to find myself laughing hysterically by the end. The book goes like this: pages and pages of meaningless prose and flowery adjectives, during which moments of possibility and intellect actually appear, only to be abandoned as quickly as it was presented in place of more meaningless prose, until the reader is hit on the head with the end. Oates must have been jolted from her depression, or must have been as bored with her own book as I was (or she was late for a deadline) because she packs a full novel in the last 1/3 of the book - introducing new characters who are as bland as the originals - and does absolutely nothing with them. Seriously. A total disaster of a book.