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Joyce Carol Oates
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I Lock My Door upon Myself Paperback – December 26, 1991

by Joyce Carol Oates (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 11 ratings
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When Calla Freilicht--a beautiful, enigmatic woman living in 1890 Shaheen, New York--embarks on a relationship with black itinerant water diviner Tyrell Thompson, the consequences are tragic
Previous page
  1. Print length
    48 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Plume
  4. Publication date
    December 26, 1991
  5. Dimensions
    5.5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0452267080
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0452267084
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set around the turn of the century, this centers on the ill-starred love between a white woman and a black man. Oates " powerfully creates a hallucinatory and harrowing atmosphere charged with sensuality and destruction," said PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Plume (December 26, 1991)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 48 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0452267080
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0452267084
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.2 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 11 ratings

About the author

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Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
11 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Blondieco
5.0 out of 5 stars but I liked this little novella because the story was folksy
Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2015
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I don't normally read fiction, nor do I read Oates, but I liked this little novella because the story was folksy, intense and interesting.
One person found this helpful
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Lauren
3.0 out of 5 stars Lousy read, critics overrated
Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2015
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Getting this book was fine. I did not like the book itself as it was a lousy read. Had to order it for my book club as it was someones suggestion.
2 people found this helpful
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Vincent Czyz
5.0 out of 5 stars A Mystery Without a Crime
Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2011
The novella begins in medias res with a black man and white woman in a rowboat "bucking the choppy waves" as it speeds the two toward Tintern Falls. The narration of this dramatic moment, however, breaks off to recount the life of Edith Honeystone, better known as Calla, from her birth in 1890.
Calla's is "a life split in two but not in half." Rebellious and recalcitrant in her youth, both toward family and toward her in-laws and husband, George Freilicht--whom she had no desire to marry--Calla emerges from a near-death experience to begin 55 years of self-imposed confinement, mostly in a room in the Freilicht household. While the plunge over the falls leaves Calla broken in physical ways, her life is broken on the no less forceful affair with Tyrell Thompson, a black man and a water dowser, who appears one day on the Freilicht farm. The end of the affair and the trauma of hurtling over Tintern Falls mark the end of Calla's willful existence ("I do what I do, what I have done is what I wanted to do") and the beginning of her life as a docile recluse.
The book presents not one but two central mysteries. First, what could bring a pair of lovers to deliberately allow themselves to be carried over Tintern Falls? Second, what makes a woman, particularly one who seems to have an indomitable will, virtually lock herself away for more than two thirds of her life?
The novella, Oates writes in the afterword is "a difficult, even a hazardous form, neither a novel in miniature, nor a pumped-up short story," yet Oates works the form brilliantly. I Lock my Door Upon Myself is intense for the duration of its 101 pages, but it is a complete story; there is no feeling at the end of something missing or left out. Even so, Oates doesn't solve either mystery neatly or explicitly; rather, the reader is left to infer the underlying causes, much as Tyrell Thompson divined the whereabouts of water with his dowsing rod.
The considerable power of the novella rests not so much on the story or the book's structure but upon the voice Oates chose to tell it. Oates breaks numerous rules, writing sentences that cover as much as three-quarters of a page and leaving out commas or even periods in traditional places. The sprawl and verve of these sentences, however, perhaps serves to mirror Calla's unruly energy and disregard for convention. Here's an example from pages 7-8: "Calla's father was often absent (Albert Honeystone: a farmer forced by crop failures and the manipulation of grain markets wholly beyond his control or even his comprehension to sell off his forty acres of rich dark fertile Chautauqua Valley soil in multi-acre parcels until only three acres remained and then he was foreman at a sawmill upriver and then a day laborer for the county, and a drinker of hard mash cider and homemade whiskey throughout), and the Honeystone grandparents were slowed by ailments, dazed and embittered country people with their only conviction a sense of the world veering off at angles inhospitable to their interests No matter how hard you work, God damn bone-aching hard you work so in that household Calla flourished like the hardiest and most practical of weeds, burdock, sunflower taking root in any soil and once rooted impossible to extirpate, such households nourish us in ways we can't know and certainly no outsider could guess."
It is this kind of writing that carries the reader irresistibly along much as the Chautauqua River carried Calla and Tyrell Thompson over the falls.
6 people found this helpful
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Tim Field
5.0 out of 5 stars Love and Isolation
Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2015
Joyce Carol Oates seems to be best known for the large bricklike novels she produces with surprising regularity, but I think it is in the short form that she really shines. I Lock My Door Upon Myself is a novella of less than one hundred pages, yet it contains a haunting tale of an odd and independent young woman in upstate New York in the early twentieth century. Calla, the young woman, frustrated from living a life in the wild, settles for a loveless marriage with an older farmer. Sleepwalking through life, she awakens when a mysterious black water diviner comes on the scene and becomes both her romantic destiny and her destruction. Oates crafts the tale as if were legend or folklore that had been told for centuries. I Lock My Door Upon Myself unfolds quickly but stays with the reader for a long time.
3 people found this helpful
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Jack Ridley
5.0 out of 5 stars Short, Intense, and Dramatic
Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2007
Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 in upstate New York State and is a distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton. She gained fame with her first novel With Shuddering Fall in 1964. Now four decades later, she is the author of scores of novels and other works. The present novella from 1990 is somewhere near the chronological middle. I have read a number of her works and set up a Guide to Joyce Carol Oates Listmania list.

Oates is known for her emotional and dramatic stories, often with women caught in stressful situations, and often set in her native upstate New York. The present novel contains those two elements. It is a story set in turn of the century (1900 to 1912 approximately) New York near the towns of Shaheen and Milburn. A young woman, Calla, is married and meets a man on their family farm dowsing for water. I quote from the end of the novel:

"Did you know it was Death that summoned you, a dowsing rod in his hand? Or was it love?"

The work is short and intense, just 98 pages long, and it is narrated by the grand-daughter. The protagonist, Calla, is left orphaned as a teenager and is forced to move in with relatives leaving her parents farm. She lived an unsettled life and marries young. Then we have what followed: a complicated marriage and love story. People in her town thought that she is "touched in the head" but it is more complicated than that.

The story opens with something very dramatic happening at Tinter Falls: two people in a small row boat up river of the falls are speeding down the river towards the falls. As readers, we we do not fully understand what is happening. Then Oates breaks away and re-traces the steps of the story, starting back at the beginning of Calla's life.

This is a dramatic and entertaining story that most Oates fans will love.
3 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Iribree
3.0 out of 5 stars Un peu déçue
Reviewed in France on March 17, 2013
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Légèrement déçue par ce court roman de Joyce Carol Oates bien que le sort de son héroÏne la belle rousse Calla ne laisse pas indifférent
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