Growing up through grief

I’d like to defend Joyce Carol Oates —she’s had so many rotten reviews of this, her latest novel. Reviewers, I reason, must get tired of a writer who publishes a novel a year (Mother, Missing is Oates’s 44th) and seek something snide to say like ‘time to slow down’ (the Guardian) or ask, like Patrick Ness in the Daily Telegraph, how this esteemed author can produce ‘a novel of such careless mediocrity?’

But, alas, I think Ness is right and the best I can do is to say that I found the autobiographical origin of the book more interesting than the novel itself, raising questions about where fiction and memoir blend.

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Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

Mother, Missing is about a daughter’s grief for her widowed mother whom she finds stabbed to death in the garage of the suburban family home in New York State.