Rent A Garden of Earthly Delights (20th Century Rediscoveries)

Synopsis

Joyce Carol Oates has revisited her second novel (originally published in 1967), making extensive revisions--chiefly to channel its original omniscient narration into a series of more character-driven voices. As she explains in a new introduction, she also has changed the plot in some places and placed greater emphasis on some of the events. The story is about a young woman named Clara Walpole, who comes from a troubled Kentucky migrant-worker family, and escapes the hardships of her background to settle in upstate New York, where she becomes the mistress of a wealthy man and gives birth to a son, Swan, who takes over part of the narrative to delineate the self-destructive tendencies he inherited from Clara’s father.

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