My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates

My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates 531 pg.

     This is one of five gothic novels that Oates wrote around the same time but then were published at various later times. This was published in 1998 and tells the story of Abraham Licht, who makes his living as a confidence man.  His several children  start out adoring him but eventually are destroyed or driven away.  He views his children as extensions of himself and insists upon using them in whatever way will maximize profit in his various scams. The oldest son Thurston almost hangs for murder, the second son Harwood is murdered and in a gruesome way, his daughter embarks on a love affair with her adopted brother and  he is banished as a result and she forced into a lackluster marriage.  The younger children fare somewhat better, Darian becomes a tortured avant-garde musician and Esther trains as a nurse and joins the suffragettes.  Yet all must leave their father or be destroyed in turn as he descends into madness as the culmination of his criminal life.
It's a strange and haunting book with an  implication of a criminal ancestor who haunts a mysterious and forbidding marsh.