My Heart Laid Bare
By Joyce Carol Oates
Dutton, $24.95
ISBN 0525944427

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Writing fiction requires talents akin to those of, say, a con artist: an ability to lie convincingly, a fervent belief in imagined worlds, and a cocky confidence that your audience wants to be seduced by deception. In My Heart Laid Bare, a mythic family saga spanning generations, these qualities are embraced by both Joyce Carol Oates and her tragic, mesmerizing characters.

Abraham Licht is patriarch of a household that includes six children and a gothic housekeeper of unexplained origins. The three women who bore the children are long gone, unable to adjust to the drama of the con artist's life -- one minute flush with money, the next running from the law. With fervor and unquestioned certainty, Abraham has dedicated his life to this Game, complete with commandments, prophecies, and ancestors of biblical proportions. Devoutly, he raises his motherless children within the constructed value system of this con world, teaching them from infancy that "God is theirs and the Game, ours."

Initially languid, the story becomes increasingly urgent as all the children reach adulthood and adapt to their father's world. Oates shifts narrative voices, giving Abraham and each child an opportunity to explain the world from their point of view. In less masterful hands, this alternating narration might be confusing, but her technique is wonderfully successful, resulting in rich layers of actions and emotions. Oates's style is impressionistic; it mimics the way we process both the banal and the exciting in everyday life. Vicariously, the reader experiences the heady mixture of thrill, intrigue, and superiority that accompanies a successful con. Oates also conveys the brutal humiliation and violence of a scam gone wrong, and the tragic consequences of the Licht religion.

Ultimately, the Game becomes a metaphor for life itself. While Abraham's biography is full of adventure (of a sort), Oates reminds us that time, the eternal equalizer, dishes out the same events, no matter how dressed up they may be with deception or imagination. In the end, even the life of a con artist can be distilled into a few simple truths common to us all -- including the fact that Joyce Carol Oates has, yet again, written a richly textured and exciting book.

Kathleen McFall is a writer and filmmaker in Portland, Oregon.