I'll Take You There

Joyce Carol Oates's 30th novel, which takes place in the early 1960s, is about a young woman (nameless, though she has given herself the name "Anellia") who grew up on a farm and wins a scholarship to an upstate New York college. In the course of trying to understand the effect on her of her highly dysfunctional family, which includes an absent father, she becomes involved with a black intellectual who treats her badly. And when she re-encounters her father, it is only to lose him again. I'LL TAKE YOU THERE contains autobiographical elements: Oates herself experienced some similar events when she was a student at Syracuse University in the '60s. The novel was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002.