THERE'S A 10TH circle in Dante's "Inferno," and it's located inside Joyce Carol Oates's brain. Known as the "Circle of Virtue," it's brimming with women and girls who must pay for the sins of being too hopeful, too forgiving, too nice. Their punishment consists of being hounded by men wielding priapic clubs who poke and prod them, ceaselessly, eternally. The protagonist of Oates's latest novel, "My Life as a Rat," spends a lot of time in this particular hell. Violet Rue Kerrigan, the seventh child of a clannish Irish Catholic household in upstate New York, is only 12 when the novel begins and still the adored baby of the family. But as surely as her name could be read as "Violent Regret," her fall from grace will be swift and brutal. Violet's childhood home is steeped in toxic masculinity. Her father, a hard-drinking plumber and Vietnam vet, forces her brothers to spar with him until their faces bleed and expects Violet and her two older sisters to be attractive, "sexy - but not too obviously." These attitudes spill into the outside world. When the two oldest Kerrigan boys, Jerome Jr. and Lionel, sexually assault a mentally disabled girl, their punishment is a meager week's suspension from school. From rape they graduate to murder. Out driving one drunken night, the brothers see a black teenager on a bike, wearing a hoodie, and think he looks "kind of suspicious" (shades of Trayvon Martin). Jerome Jr. aims the front fender of the car at the bike, knocking the boy over, and soon a baseball bat comes into gruesome play. Leave it to their pesky little sister to see them washing and hiding said bat. She connects the dots to the crime and tries to tell her mother what she saw, but her mother refuses to listen. Her priest also harshly silences her, admonishing her for putting her brothers' lives at risk. Like the assault of the mentally disabled girl, the murder of the black teenager raises ugly questions about which of the lives in this small community carry more value. Eventually someone listens to Violet, and her brothers are sent to prison for manslaughter. As a result, Violet is told she will never be forgiven for "going outside of the family." She is cast out - first to a foster home, then sent to live with an aunt. Oates has long been preoccupied with male violence, racial strife and female victimhood. "My Life as a Rat" has all three of these elements in abundance. At the despairing center is poor Violet, flung into a cruel and indifferent world. Where she'll land is the question that produces the book's major tension, and the reader must agonize alongside her. In this book, most men are swine: the Nazi-loving math teacher whose smile looks like "meat grinning"; the creepy uncle with "suet-colored eyes" and a "meat-smile"; the vulgar employer who humiliates and degrades her. I came to dread the introduction of any new male character or the mere mention of the word "meat." After a while, Violet's trajectory seemed predictable, her torturous penance too prolonged. I kept hoping for a Lisbeth Salander moment, when she'd start punching the world back. "My Life as a Rat" does provide Violet with an alternate family, individuals who seem to be as broken as she is, whose need for one another may make the group that much stronger. Might she be allowed, finally and very deservedly, to obtain a bit of earthly nirvana? JULl A SCHEERES is the author, most recently, of "A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown."

Oates's remarkable latest (after 2018's Hazards of Time Travel) chronicles how a 12-year-old girl's fate is determined after her family disowns her. The story opens in 1991 as Violet Rue Kerrigan, the youngest in a large Irish-Catholic family where loyalty is highly valued, grows up doted on by her loving but short-tempered father. She witnesses what later turns out to be her eldest brothers, teenagers Jerome and Lionel, attempting to get rid of evidence that they had participated in the racially charged beating of a high school kid. Violet's guilt-compounded by Lionel assaulting her and the death of their victim-makes her blurt out the truth unsolicited. Her parents, who can't bring themselves to believe the truth about their sons, send Violet to live with an aunt in an upstate New York town 80 miles away. Violet spends her life hoping for her family's change of heart and worrying about her brothers' retaliation. Her urge to not betray anyone again makes her vulnerable to sexual abuse by a teacher and a lecherous uncle. Despite it all, Violet becomes a survivor who ekes out a living through manual labor and manages to attend college at night. Oates's novel adroitly touches on race, loyalty, misogyny, and class inequality while also telling a moving story with a winning narrator. This book should please her fans and win her new ones. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A young girl is exiled from her family after she reveals her brothers' involvement in a brutal crime.Oates (Mysteries of Winterthurn, 2018, etc.) has often found her fictional subject matter in the lives of girls and young women struggling with the aftermath of trauma. This time her main character is Violet Rue Kerrigan, youngest of seven siblings in a close-knit, working-class Irish Catholic family living on Oates' upstate New York turf in the early 1990s. It's a family imbued with sexism and racism, led by an angry father and a mother who teaches her three daughters compliance as a way to survive such men; as Violet says: "If you do not antagonize them, if you behave exactly as they wish you to behave, they will not be cruel to you." Violet learns the terrible consequences of noncompliance when she's 12. Her two oldest brothers have already evaded punishment for a gang rape when, one night, out drinking, they encounter a lone black teenager and beat him savagely. Violet is the only one who knows their secret. After the boy dies, she panics and tells her school principal and nurse what she knows. She's put in protective custodyone brother has injured her as a threatbut is utterly shocked to learn that her family doesn't want her back. Oates follows Violet for more than a decade as, marked by the traumas of her exile and her upbringing, she is targeted by a series of male predators. Her mental stability sometimes deteriorates into the fever-dream state Oates can evoke so well; the author shifts point of view among first, second, and third person as if Violet can't even get a grip on her own identity. Violet's fraught relationship with her family moves to an explosive climax, but there are signs of redemption as well, for her at least.Oates explores the long echoes of violence born of sexism and racism in one young woman's life in this deft psychological thriller. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

On the night a popular high-school student from South Niagara's black neighborhood is murdered, 12-year-old Violet Rue Kerrigan overhears her brothers, Jerr and Lionel, talking about a fight. Realizing that Violet has been eavesdropping, they exact a promise of silence, one that Lionel reinforces by viciously assaulting his sister. Violet cracks under the combined pressures of secrecy, violence, and the relentless tension of living in a household where her parents' approval is always sought, rarely given. She unburdens herself to a teacher, leading to her brothers' arrest and the intervention from Child Protective Services, which sends Violet to live with relatives in another city. But Violet is far from safe, and her vulnerability renders her the perfect prey for pedophiles at home and school and at the mercy of domineering men for the rest of her life. Oates' frequent themes of exile, predators and their victims, racial conflicts, and gender violence coalesce in this psychologically and socially complex portrait of a young woman's struggle as she loses her family but finds herself.--Carol Haggas Copyright 2019 Booklist