PEOPLE ARE DRAWN to the Niagara Falls for many reasons, but this awesome spectacle holds a peculiar magnetism for those at an emotional extreme (honeymooners and the suicidal are regular visitors). Ariah and Gilbert, the newlyweds in Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel, manage to fall into both groups. When the new Mrs Erskine wakes in a hotel bridal suite the morning after her wedding, she is already a widow – her husband of less than twenty-four hours having sneaked off at dawn to hurl himself into the raging waters. And so begins a tragic postwar American love story spanning three decades and several generations of a family blighted by its uneasy enchantment with the siren call of the Falls. Not that the love story is Ariah’s and Gilbert’s. They hated one another, trapped as they were – by family and other pressures – in a union of convenience. Yet, when Gilbert makes his dramatic exit, his abandoned bride is so shocked that, as if in a trance, she keeps a weeklong vigil on the banks of the Niagara River until the body is found. In so doing, she is mistaken for a devastated young widow, transfixed with grief for the lost love of her life. In fact, she is just about to meet him. Dirk Burnaby, wealthy lawyer and prominent figure in the local community, takes it upon himself to chaperone this tragic woman . . . and, almost literally, falls under her spell. Not long after the first husband’s bloated and putrefying corpse floats into view, Ariah marries again – and, this time, for love.

This isn’t the first story by Oates to pivot on an unseemly drowning – her novella Black Water was a reworking of the 1969 Chappaquiddick scandal, when Senator Edward Kennedy survived a car plunge into a river that killed his companion, Mary Jo Kopechne. But then Oates has written so many books over the past forty years, it would be surprising if she didn’t revisit familiar subjects and themes once in a while. It is hard to think of a more prolific author (it seems only weeks since The Tattooed Girl was published) or one of such versatility and consistently high quality. Her books have ranged from popular successes like We Were the Mulvaneys, to Blonde, a fictional homage to Marilyn Monroe; from award-winning short-story collections to her early, gritty urban family saga, Them. My own particular favourite is the more obscure trilogy of genre-subverting detective novellas, The Mysteries of Winterthurn. Oates has won more National Book Awards than you could shake a stick at, and yet critics still feel the need to argue the case for her to rank up there – with the usual male suspects – as a contender for the title of Great American Novelist. Perhaps she is a victim of her own productivity. Her output has been, and remains, nearly as torrential as the Niagara River itself- and it is hard to take proper stock of a natural or creative force while it is still so turbulently in motion.

Which segues, somewhat clumsily, back to the story of Ariah and Dirk. Niagara Falls has brought them together, but in their different ways they are both so vulnerable to its emotional, physical and psychological allure that we fear they may yet be destroyed by that which joined them. The connections are many: Dirk’s grandfather dead after attempting a tightrope walk above the Falls, their son Royall works on the tourist boats, their daughter Juliet hears voices beckoning her to leap into the current, and, as in Black Water, look out for the car crash. So, what begins in 1950 as the tale of a prematurely curtailed marriage turns into the saga of a family of troubled spirits unable to tear themselves away from the Falls any more than they can tear themselves away from each other, much as they try. It is a bravura performance by Oates. In Ariah, she has created a most unusual and diverting heroine, and her marriage to Dirk rates alongside that of Peter Carey’s eponymous heroes Oscar and Lucinda as one of the extraordinary romantic couplings in contemporary fiction. And the writing is like the natural phenomenon that inspired it: effervescent, captivating, and wreathed in the mists of the mysteries we spectators project onto it.