My Life as a Rat is the shocking story of Violet Rue Kerrigan, youngest of seven children in a working-class Irish Catholic family living in hardscrabble early-1990s South Niagara, NY. Violet’s domestic life is largely governed by the family’s tight budget and her short-tempered father’s moods, attitudes and habits. This is a time and place where men and boys expect to be served and girls and women unquestioningly assume a submissive role. Violet’s world is also one suffused by an undercurrent of misogyny and racism, mostly unspoken but unmistakable and unavoidable, and coloured by a belief that loyalty to family is more important than almost anything else. Violet is unexceptional. She accepts life as it is. Smart and perceptive, she is not inclined to rebellion or defiance. She loves her parents and siblings. But everything changes one night when she is twelve. Violet is awakened when her two eldest brothers, Jerome and Lionel, return home from a night out drinking. She creeps downstairs and witnesses them washing up, using water from the garden hose to clean blood from a baseball bat, overhears them in whispers debating how to get rid of it. She suspects something is wrong but can’t imagine what it might be. But the next day she learns that a black boy from her school, Hadrian Johnson, has been found gravely injured after a violent beating and is in hospital. The situation escalates after Hadrian dies. Tormented by what she knows, Violet cannot hold back the secret, and when the truth emerges and her brothers are convicted, she is astonished to find that her family regards her actions as betrayal and want nothing to do with her. The novel follows Violet’s life in exile, living first with her aunt and uncle in Port Oriskany, and finally on her own, yearning for a reconciliation with her parents, fearing what her brothers could do to her once they’ve served their sentences and are free. As often happens in Oates’s fiction, the emotionally isolated female protagonist is targeted by predatory males who sense her helplessness and exploit her lack of trust in the world at large. And though Violet is a survivor—self-reliant, tough, capable of unscrupulous behaviour when it helps her escape untenable situations—it is her soft spot for her family that almost does her in. Throughout the book, Oates uses a breathless narrative style to create urgency and ramp up the tension: we compulsively turn the pages, knowing we’re in the hands of a master. In telling Violet's story, Joyce Carol Oates does not shy away from brutal realities. Undoubtedly My Life as a Rat is sometimes difficult, but it is a thoroughly engaging novel that delivers on its premise in spades. ( )

Unrelentingly sad and haunting, and yet impossible to put down, this story of Vi’let and her large and troubled family is heartbreaking.
It’s a tale so many women know, of being left at the end of life events, having been put there not under their own agency, but at the hands of others. Mainly male others.
There’s heartache and abandonment here, tales of a woman who is so wrapped in desperate events one has to wonder how she kept going on, how she cling to a version of herself that tried to do good with the small powers she had.
Definitely a “high-residue” story, told masterfully.
I won’t forget it soon, and the resonance of Violet’s experiences with those I’ve had made it affect me even more strongly.
Not for the weak-hearted. ( )

Damn, this is an (unintentional) endorsement of the "no snitchin" mentality if there ever was one. In my wildest fantasies I am imagining street criminals handing this JCO book to their enemies to warn them about what will happen if they even *think* about testifying in court! On a more serious note though, this book is brutal, but with a sliver of hope at the end, as per usual with Joyce. The characters are all very well fleshed out and vivid in my mind. I can always count on Joyce to give me something to chew on for a few days, which is why she is still my favorite author after all these years. ( )

For the most part, this was an enjoyable book to read. The prose flowed smoothly and it read quickly. Most of the chapters were short, some as short as a page or two. There were a few very long chapters, but they contained breaks so you had a convenient place to stop if need be.

The story is about Violet, who told the authorities about her brothers who savagely beat a black man to death. As a result of “ratting” on her brothers, she was ostracized from the family and shipped away to live with her mother’s sister.

Prior to the story, Oates says the story appeared as a short story called “Curly Red” in Harper’s Magazine and it is contained in her short story collection “I Am No One You Know.” I wanted to read the short story first so I had an idea of how the novel would progress. The short story starts out similarly to the novel, but the ending is radically different. In the short story, Violet’s father finally forgives her on his hospital death bed. This is a very emotional scene and really the crux of the story. However, in the novel, her father dies in the parking lot of a bar and hardly a paragraph is used to mention his death. Violet is not with him when he dies and his death is treated just in passing. This is unfortunate, as the novel would have been much better off if Violet had had more closure with her father at the end.

There are also a couple of sections of the novel that should have been omitted and the book would have been a tighter read. Part of the story is the encounters with her math teacher, Mr. Sandman, who drugs her and abuses her repeatedly. This section is not integral to the story as a whole and serves no purpose. It should have been left out.

Also, Violet develops a relationship with a man whose home she is cleaning, Orlando Metti. Again, this seems to come out of nowhere, stops down the narrative arc of the story and was included just to pad the novel. The novel is 400 pages and if these two sections were removed, it would be a better length and a much better story.

A couple of craft issues bothered me. There are several POV shifts from first to third and back to first person POV that were jarring and took me out of the story. Also there were tense changes from the past to the present and back to the past, even in the same paragraph. The story is told from Violet’s point of view, but there is some “head hopping” as we are told in the same paragraph what another character is thinking. I cannot imagine how these escaped an editor’s attention.

Overall, the story, despite being too long, is a decent read which I do recommend. ( )

The Cost of Doing Right

Joyce Carol Oates has written volumes of fiction on family, race, womanhood, childhood. She has woven real-life events into powerful and enlightening novels, among them in recent years The Sacrifice and A Book of American Martyrs. Now, in her newest release, she takes on a subject in the news and touching every American, our national reversion to virulent tribalism. Correctly, as her novel points out, tribalism has always been with us in its most elemental form, the family. In the hierarchy of loyalty, so it goes, one is loyal first to family, next to country, and last to humanity in general. Mixed into tribal novel, adding texture, and often brutal reality, are the physical and sexual abuse and subjugation of women, the terror of childhood, and seemingly ineradicable racism. But JCO also finds hope here in the strength and independence of the individual. All this gets folded into one of her most put upon creations, Violet Rue Kerrigan. Quite a name, as readers will come to appreciate, for a young girl who manages to survive, and thrive, but never forget.

Violet Rue Kerrigan grows up in the Kerrigan clan of South Niagara, New York. She lives in a large immediate family, father Jerome, mother Lula, siblings in order, Jerome Jr., Miriam, Lionel, Les, Katie, Rick, and Violet. They live in a small house, a workingman’s house that Jerome takes special pride in keeping well tended, in contrast to his neighbors, located at 388 Black Rock St., South Niagara, New York, an address repeated often because the essence here is unity of and loyalty to family, no matter what, and the importance of home. The Kerrigans are a big clan that include all levels of success, all the way up to an old-style boss politician who wields considerable influence in the region. And Violet Rue’s Kerrigans are as traditional Irish Catholic as they come with a clear immutable division of male and female roles. Which is not to say that the women, particularly Lula, happily embrace their roles, but rather find themselves trapped in them by the yokes of force and money.

The novel opens with Violet Rue at twelve and the two older boys already defined as brutal troublemakers due to their abuse and rape of special needs student Liza Deaver, which for various reasons well known to anybody who follows situations like this, they get away with. They then go on to bigger crime. While out drinking and joy riding with a cousin and a friend, they come upon Hadrian Johnson, a classmate, a lettered athlete, riding his bike home in the dark. They hit him with their car and then proceed to beat him to death with a baseball bat. It’s a racial crime that gets turned on its head by the Kerrigans and the other whites in South Niagara as prejudice against the white boys. That is, until Violet Rue, having seen her bothers cleaning the murder weapon that they later bury near home, becomes so overwhelmingly traumatized, so sick, that she from the need to rid herself of the knowledge inadvertently reveals it in the school nurse’s office. This results in the imprisonment of her brothers Jerome, Jr. and Lionel and her ostracized from the family, sent off to live with an Aunt and her husband in Port Oriskany, a place JCO readers know well.

To this point, the men in Violet Rue’s life have been pretty bad and she has not only been traumatized by them, by their murderous ways, but also permanently separated from her immediate family. Now, when in her most vulnerable state, the men get much worse, in the forms of her aunt’s lewd husband; Mr. Sandman, a math teacher by day and a sexual abuser and neo-Nazi by night; and later Professor Orlando Metti, manipulative, and both emotionally cruel and abusive. Fact is, until near the end of the novel the only decent male in her life is the little French bulldog Brindle that Metti requires Violet to care for and then uses to callously torment her with. Through all of this, Violet Rue yearns to be with her family, hopes that her father will accept her again, and fears that her brothers, once released from prison, will not come looking for her with murder in their hearts.

And yet, through all this turmoil and torture, Violet Rue manages to survive. Not only survive, she finds strength in herself, she finishes college, she plans a future, and she meets a man from her past with whom, despite everything, she might have a relationship. And then there is her family, the fate of her brothers, the father and mother, her sisters, the house at 388 Black Rock St., South Niagara, New York. What happens to them, and to her relationship with them? It’s a difficult road for Violet Rue back to the street and whether she makes it back, and if she does what she may find. These are left up to the reader to discover on their own in this recommended novel about breaking from the tribe to do the right thing. ( )