CHILDWOLD by Joyce Carol Oates

 I read to p. 139 (half of the book) by Fr 12/3/21

This is one of my ancient paperbacks and no record of when I bought it and this was my first attempt.

It's the story of a fourteen year old girl who has an affair with man nearly forty.

He's a rich man from a prominent family and she is from a poor family of many children.

The story unfolds with several different points of view.

Page-long paragraphs that went on forever.

From New York Times and posted in Goodreads:

"This is the story of an enchantment and its dramatic consequences. At the centre is the frustrated love of a man in his forties for a fourteen-year-old girl whom he meets and befriends.

Drawn into her strange family and the haunting world of Childwold, he discovers that, while others find freedom for themselves, for him there is no escape.

"A blowsy mother whose many children have many fathers; her 14-year-old daughter, Laney, and Kasch, an anguished intellectual who loves them both...The novel's tight Oedipal triangle opens into a triple alliance against age and aggression as each person tries to turn the biological clock back towards innocence. Laney's mother wants to bear children to narrow the world to a child's room. Laney starves herself to stop her menstrual cycle and prolong her childhood. Kasch in his insanity is harmless, nonsexual, helpless...Drawn by his vulnerability in the same way that Kasch was drawn by her poverty, Laney may cling to Kasch and he to her as children cling together in the dark." (New York Times, 11/28/76)" 

This was not one of Joyce Carol Oates's more well received works, but I would give her another chance if I ran across one of her novels.