It makes sense that Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel, her 36th, is dedicated to “my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern, the ‘gravedigger’s daughter’ ”. It has a raw episodic quality that, at times, makes it feel more like biography than fiction. The story opens in the autumn of 1959, as a young woman, Rebecca Tignor, is accosted by a man in a panama hat as she walks home from her factory job along a remote canal in New York state. Although he at first appears to intend Rebecca harm, he soon identifies himself as a doctor and says he merely wants to know if she is “Hazel Jones”.

Rebecca denies that she is, but the strange encounter sets her thinking about her past. The daughter of Jacob and Anna Schwart, German immigrants who fled Hitler, she was born on a crowded ocean liner in New York harbour in the days before the second world war (whether or not the Schwart family is Jewish remains an open question for much of the book). Jacob, a former maths teacher, is a brooding, cynical man whose favourite quote comes from Hegel: “The owl of Minerva soars only at dusk.” In other words, wisdom only comes too late. Jacob’s pessimism is borne out when the only work he can find in America is digging graves. The drudgery and humiliation eventually drive him mad, leading to a tragedy that shatters the family and leaves Rebecca on her own while barely in her teens.

She eventually finds work as a chambermaid and begins an affair with a charismatic, roughhewn beer salesman named Niles Tignor. Although the reader senses danger ahead for Rebecca, she sees a chance for redeeming her guilt at not being able to rescue her tormented father. “She believed that she was strong enough to save [Tignor] as she had not been strong enough to save Jacob Schwart.” They marry, but Tignor proves to be a drunken lout who beats Rebecca and their young son, Niley, who shows a gift for music at an early age. In the novel’s finest passage, Rebecca flees with three-year-old Niley after adopting the identity Hazel Jones and dubbing the boy “Zacharias”. After taking a series of deadend jobs, she winds up marrying Chet Gallagher, the alcoholic, rebellious son of a media tycoon who works as a lounge pianist. A failed classical musician, Gallagher recognises Zacharias’s gift and takes over his education. Finally, the gravedigger’s daughter can try to bury the ghosts of her past.

If the novel has a significant flaw, it is its length. At nearly 600 pages, it never really develops the narrative momentum needed to ease the reader through this long journey. While individual passages take on a pressing urgency, the story itself remains oddly static, a quality reinforced by its curious ending, which consists of an exchange of letters between Rebecca and her cousin Freyda, the Holocaust survivor who would have shared a bed with Rebecca had her boat not been turned back by cynical American authorities. Similarly, the last-minute discovery of the identity of the real Hazel Jones feels forced and inconsequential.

Readers who don’t mind making their way through the book’s occasional dry spells will be rewarded by a richly nuanced portrait of a woman who survives more than her share of abuse and loss. Few writers write more convincingly about male violence than Oates, and her depiction of its effects on her heroine are memorable. Every man close to Rebecca turns out to be capable of exploding with rage (even the gentle Gallagher has a self-destructive streak), Zacharias shows signs of inheriting this dark legacy from his father and grandfather, and the stranger in the panama is revealed to be an exemplar of a male of the worst kind. With a combination of resiliency and defiance, Rebecca endures them all, and winds up with a measure of peace and understanding by the book’s end. For her, at least, Minerva’s owl, that symbol for wisdom, has flown before the sun has set.

THE GRAVEDIGGER’S DAUGHTER by Joyce Carol Oates
Fourth Estate £18.99 pp582
Buy the book here at the offer price of £17.09 (inc p&p)

Times Recommends

• When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
• The Spare Room by Helen Garner
• Is Bertie Wooster the only fish-faced hero?