‘Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars’ by Joyce Carol Oates
(Have been reading a lot, but posting out of reading order because there’s a backlog and I just want to clear them.)
John Earle McClaren, nicknamed "Whitey", is a well-respected 67-year-old man who served as the mayor of Hammond, New York, and is the father of five children. Whitey, who is white, intervenes in a police stop of an Indian American man. He is tased by the police, suffers a stroke, and dies. The rest of the novel concerns the fall-out of Whitey's death for the McClaren family—Whitey's widow, Jessalyn, and his children, Beverly, Lorene, Thom, Virgil, and Sophia—including Jessalyn's relationship with a Cuban artist and Thom's pursuit of charges against the officers responsible for Whitey's death. (taken from Wikipedia)
It's a big book, over 750 pages, and it made me think about Big Books in general. I spent a lot of time considering whether the five siblings could have been cut down to three. A couple of them seem to occupy similar spaces emotionally, and I wondered if another author’s editor might have suggested trims. There’s a counter-argument, though, that the family dynamics wouldn’t be the way they are if there had only been three children, as the competition for attention and affection would have been different.
I’ve only read a few Joyce Carol Oates books, but all of them leave me feeling impressed, but hollowed out.