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Horror lurks within
By Christopher Benfey |
April 12, 2009, Sunday
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THE 14 noirish narratives of novelist Joyce Carol Oates, gathered with a title story that might be summarized as "Dear Husband, I'm afraid I've killed the kids," imply that American family life, especially of the upscale white suburban variety, is no protection against the horrors that lurk a block, a click, a letter, a phone call away.
In the opening story, "Panic," a complacent corporate lawyer, in the car with his wife and baby, finds himself trapped behind a school bus, "that unmistakable color of virulent high-concentrate urine." Suddenly, from within it, he sees a gun pointed at him. "Panic can only be borne by a man," his sardonic wife concludes of the aftermath, "if there is no witness."
In the ironically titled story "A Princeton Idyll," a writer of children's books, who publishes under the name Sophie Riddle, blithely researches the life of her grandfather, a famous logician, only to find that her grandparents' irascible former housekeeper knows some explosive secrets. "How a 'perfect' family can fall to pieces!" Sophie reflects. "And so quickly."
The smug addresses in Oates's stories have a certain doomed poignancy, as though luxurious seclusion will summon the very demons it seeks to banish - "a large white Colonial on a hill in Baskings Grove Estates, near Quarton Road;" a "sprawling French Normandy house on a large, partly wooded and professionally landscaped lot in the Village of Fair Hills;" a house with "floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows" on "rural-suburban Edgehill Lane three miles (4.8 kilometers) north of the village of Tarkington."
While the nightmare possibilities of cloning turn up in that Norman manor, Oates suggests that an equally insidious kind of replication is taking place in the homogenized lives of the right addresses, the right prep schools ("It's heartbreaking to see the exit sign for Groton," one mother sighs, "and not be going there to see my son.") as well as the right universities and the right careers.
How unexpectedly full of murderous hatred are the "perfect" families that live like inmates in these cookie-cutter mansions, how ripe for infanticide, matricide, patricide, fratricide, suicide. And how unexpectedly full of weaponry these dream houses can be.
The "nine Japanese-made stainless steel knives with carved black handles, magnetized against a metal bar above the blond wood butcher block table" are obviously sinister, but violence can also be inflicted by scissors, cushions, bathtubs, even a bowl of scalding spaghetti.
If there's a moral here, it's the anything-can-happen wisdom of what Oates calls "brutal and horrific" fairy tales. You may live amid blooming yellow forsythia in a "white-gleaming aluminum-sided Colonial at 23 Quail Circle" in "the brick-gated community Whispering Woods Estates," but there's absolutely nothing you can do to prevent your 19-year-old son's corpse from turning up in the Tioga County landfill "amid a grinding of dump trucks, bulldozers, cries of swooping and darting birds."
When "Landfill," the stand-out achievement in this strong collection, appeared in The New Yorker, questions were raised about its promiscuous mixing of fact and fiction. Like many writers before her, Oates had based her story on an actual tragedy, here shifting the location from New Jersey to Michigan but retaining such details as the date of the hapless boy's death in the dumpster.
The way "real life" can impinge on fiction is a playful sub-theme for Oates. In "A Princeton Idyll," the philosopher and Nietzsche translator Walter Kaufmann appears as a love interest of the desperate housekeeper. In "The Heart Sutra," which borrows from the doomed lives of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, a young poet tries to track down her recently departed lover, the father of her child.
Known for his "sparely crafted elegiac poetry," he's holed up in a Zen retreat, trying to forget her and the other complications in his life, so she calls his "most valued poet-friend Nobel Prize-winning Derek Walcott who 'isn't available' to speak with her." In "Dear Joyce Carol," a deranged Vietnam veteran tries to persuade Oates, who he is convinced is "a Lady not a corse type of female like the kind prevalent in this State & in the State of Utah," to write his life story.
Sexual obsession and betrayal are Oates' operatic themes, and she's at her best when she respects her speakers. "Dear Joyce Carol" smacks of condescension and so does "Dear Husband," her attempt (reminiscent of Eudora Welty's "Where Is the Voice Coming From?") to get inside the head of Andrea Yates, who killed her children in a much-publicized case in Texas.
The narrator's ramblings are a predictable mishmash, evidence of battered wife syndrome and born-again lunacy: "Jesus said to me, It is true that you are a bad mother but there is a way: 'if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.'?"
More persuasive is the "fancy prose style," as Nabokov might have called it, of the vengeful librarian in "Mistrial" ("As a librarian for 18 years at the Merck branch of the Trenton Public Library, I was sorely tested by the slow-witted and obtuse among the citizenry.") or the intellectual heroin addict in the lovely story "Magda Maria," obsessed with a femme fatale who hangs out in the local taverns.
"Magda Maria she was known to us in the early 1970s on River Street, in south Sparta. No one could have said what her last name was or where she'd come from."
Steeped in Rimbaud, the narrator speaks for many of Oates' characters when he says, "we were spirits of the dead and the damned clamoring for our lost lives in a perpetual trance of longing."
In the opening story, "Panic," a complacent corporate lawyer, in the car with his wife and baby, finds himself trapped behind a school bus, "that unmistakable color of virulent high-concentrate urine." Suddenly, from within it, he sees a gun pointed at him. "Panic can only be borne by a man," his sardonic wife concludes of the aftermath, "if there is no witness."
In the ironically titled story "A Princeton Idyll," a writer of children's books, who publishes under the name Sophie Riddle, blithely researches the life of her grandfather, a famous logician, only to find that her grandparents' irascible former housekeeper knows some explosive secrets. "How a 'perfect' family can fall to pieces!" Sophie reflects. "And so quickly."
The smug addresses in Oates's stories have a certain doomed poignancy, as though luxurious seclusion will summon the very demons it seeks to banish - "a large white Colonial on a hill in Baskings Grove Estates, near Quarton Road;" a "sprawling French Normandy house on a large, partly wooded and professionally landscaped lot in the Village of Fair Hills;" a house with "floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows" on "rural-suburban Edgehill Lane three miles (4.8 kilometers) north of the village of Tarkington."
While the nightmare possibilities of cloning turn up in that Norman manor, Oates suggests that an equally insidious kind of replication is taking place in the homogenized lives of the right addresses, the right prep schools ("It's heartbreaking to see the exit sign for Groton," one mother sighs, "and not be going there to see my son.") as well as the right universities and the right careers.
How unexpectedly full of murderous hatred are the "perfect" families that live like inmates in these cookie-cutter mansions, how ripe for infanticide, matricide, patricide, fratricide, suicide. And how unexpectedly full of weaponry these dream houses can be.
The "nine Japanese-made stainless steel knives with carved black handles, magnetized against a metal bar above the blond wood butcher block table" are obviously sinister, but violence can also be inflicted by scissors, cushions, bathtubs, even a bowl of scalding spaghetti.
If there's a moral here, it's the anything-can-happen wisdom of what Oates calls "brutal and horrific" fairy tales. You may live amid blooming yellow forsythia in a "white-gleaming aluminum-sided Colonial at 23 Quail Circle" in "the brick-gated community Whispering Woods Estates," but there's absolutely nothing you can do to prevent your 19-year-old son's corpse from turning up in the Tioga County landfill "amid a grinding of dump trucks, bulldozers, cries of swooping and darting birds."
When "Landfill," the stand-out achievement in this strong collection, appeared in The New Yorker, questions were raised about its promiscuous mixing of fact and fiction. Like many writers before her, Oates had based her story on an actual tragedy, here shifting the location from New Jersey to Michigan but retaining such details as the date of the hapless boy's death in the dumpster.
The way "real life" can impinge on fiction is a playful sub-theme for Oates. In "A Princeton Idyll," the philosopher and Nietzsche translator Walter Kaufmann appears as a love interest of the desperate housekeeper. In "The Heart Sutra," which borrows from the doomed lives of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, a young poet tries to track down her recently departed lover, the father of her child.
Known for his "sparely crafted elegiac poetry," he's holed up in a Zen retreat, trying to forget her and the other complications in his life, so she calls his "most valued poet-friend Nobel Prize-winning Derek Walcott who 'isn't available' to speak with her." In "Dear Joyce Carol," a deranged Vietnam veteran tries to persuade Oates, who he is convinced is "a Lady not a corse type of female like the kind prevalent in this State & in the State of Utah," to write his life story.
Sexual obsession and betrayal are Oates' operatic themes, and she's at her best when she respects her speakers. "Dear Joyce Carol" smacks of condescension and so does "Dear Husband," her attempt (reminiscent of Eudora Welty's "Where Is the Voice Coming From?") to get inside the head of Andrea Yates, who killed her children in a much-publicized case in Texas.
The narrator's ramblings are a predictable mishmash, evidence of battered wife syndrome and born-again lunacy: "Jesus said to me, It is true that you are a bad mother but there is a way: 'if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.'?"
More persuasive is the "fancy prose style," as Nabokov might have called it, of the vengeful librarian in "Mistrial" ("As a librarian for 18 years at the Merck branch of the Trenton Public Library, I was sorely tested by the slow-witted and obtuse among the citizenry.") or the intellectual heroin addict in the lovely story "Magda Maria," obsessed with a femme fatale who hangs out in the local taverns.
"Magda Maria she was known to us in the early 1970s on River Street, in south Sparta. No one could have said what her last name was or where she'd come from."
Steeped in Rimbaud, the narrator speaks for many of Oates' characters when he says, "we were spirits of the dead and the damned clamoring for our lost lives in a perpetual trance of longing."
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