Because it is Bitter and Because it is my Heart

Because it is Bitter and Because it is My Heart – Joyce Carol Oates

It’s rural New York in the 1950s and Iris Courtney is growing up on the wrong side of lucky. Her dad has a gambling problem, and while it occasionally brings in luxurious gifts, it more often results in unpaid debt. They move frequently, trying to stay in the nicest neighborhood they can afford while avoiding the streets that everybody knows are the territory of white trash. There is no concern about living in a black neighborhood because racial divides are so embedded that the possibility of having black neighbors is unthinkable even when they don’t have enough money to get by. For a white family, maintaining the semblance of class is what matters. Iris’s mom concerns herself with brands, labels, keeping the right company, and maintaining her reputation above all else. Constantly seeking upward mobility without acknowledging her lack of opportunity, she denies or ignores every problem she encounters. Rather than aiming for a good reputation, Iris’s father focuses more on a good time, causing the demise of their marriage. Meanwhile, Iris tries desperately to figure out her relationships with other people within the context of her race and class boundaries. Her life is forever altered and continuously redefined when the black boy she loves kills a white boy from a white trash family who had been threatening her. (Don’t worry, that’s not much of a spoiler – it happens in the first section of the book and is the impetus for every other major plot point). Iris comes of age while trying to find her identity amidst all her struggles of how to relate to people and why.

Because it is Bitter is the first…anything, I think…that I’ve read by Joyce Carol Oates, so I don’t know much about her background and I can’t compare it to her other work. She writes not quite in stream of consciousness, but her sentence structure tends to reflect natural thought patterns with some fully formed, grammatically correct sentences, but most of them with a few errors, some incomplete thoughts, and some consisting of just single words. It took me a while to get used to this style of writing because I am one of those people who have to read every word of every sentence, but after the first section, I stopped noticing it. The bulk of the novel is written from the perspective of Iris, but she switches between characters occasionally and convincingly builds different patterns of thought and speech, different behaviors, and different perspectives. I was very impressed with the character development.

I read this book on the recommendation of another PCV (I love reading books recommended by others, please let me know what you think I should read!). She was a high school English teacher before she came to Peace Corps, and she said “I was reading this book, and I thought it would have been great for my class. Then it got kinda sexy, and I realized why we would never have read it. So I thought you might like it.” It certainly fits her description, and I really enjoyed the book. I wouldn’t make a blanket recommendation that everyone read it, but I can think of some people who would also really enjoy it.