"Little Bird of Heaven" (Ecco, 442 pages, $25.99) is an enthralling mystery, the story of a murder that mucks up the lives of two families. And because it's by Joyce Carol Oates, America's most taken-for-granted writer, it's much more -- a dark, masterful exploration of crime and punishment, guilt and innocence, love and hate, sex and violence in a working-class corner of New York state.
The story opens in the 1980s in the fictional town of Sparta after the brutal murder of Zoe Kruller, a charismatic barmaid and singer who dabbled in drugs and slept with many men not her husband. There are two suspects: her husband, Delray Kruller, an alcoholic mechanic, and Eddy Diehl, her volatile married lover. There isn't enough evidence to charge either, and each swears he didn't do it.
The story is told through the eyes of two teenagers: Aaron, the son of Zoe and Delray, and Krista, the daughter of Eddy. Zoe's death and the subsequent spotlight on their fathers wreak havoc on their lives. Delray, tough and inarticulate, drops out of school and briefly becomes a meth dealer's lieutenant. Shy Krista tries to hide at school and often sneaks off with her increasingly unstable father, whom her mother has forbidden her to see.
As teens, Aaron and Krista briefly come together, and toward book's end they meet again as the mystery starts to unravel.
Oates, who lives in New Jersey, is famously prolific and infamously uneven in quality. But no American novelist comes as close to authentically chronicling the things that can go wrong, and less frequently right, in blue-collar lives. "Little Bird of Heaven" contains passages of such gritty beauty that you'll want to read them out loud for their industrial-strength cinematic power. If you've never read an Oates novel, start with this one. It's classic Oates, and we mean that in a very, very good way.
