Fresh bloom quickly fades
By Randy Boyagoda |
January 20, 2013, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
BLACK Dahlia & White Rose" is Joyce Carol Oates' 25th book of short stories. Her immense productivity - the torrent of novels and stories that began in the early 1960s - means that every release meets with the same question: Does she have anything fresh and urgent to reveal at this point in her long and very fine career? The answer, with her latest, may depend on how you regard Oates' descriptions of older women.
The stories in this collection generally involve a combination of macabre events, fantastical turns and unguarded first-person storytelling. Oates explores the rough fortunes of (mostly) women who think they're in control of their situations but are proved wrong, sometimes brutally so.
The title story juxtaposes two aspiring starlets from 1940s Los Angeles. One, Elizabeth Short, was rechristened "the Black Dahlia" by the gutter press during a lurid murder investigation occasioned by the discovery of her mangled body, split apart at the torso. In Oates' rendition, Betty speaks from beyond the grave about how she lived and died, and also offers a catty running commentary on her roommate, a certain Norma Jeane Baker.
This fragile "White Rose" interests a strange, shy doctor who secretly attends their photo shoots and eventually invites both women to dinner. Wiser and (by her own flawed reckoning) more alluring, Betty deceitfully gets the doctor all to herself, and while he's kissing, chloroforming and butchering her, we hear from Norma Jeane, upset as Betty has failed to pick her up from the bar where they'd planned to meet.
With its strong contrast of dark and light sensibilities, voices and fates, this first story seems to offer an interpretive key to the rest of the collection. But few of the following stories sustain that much scrutiny.
The weaker ones read like strained experiments (a narrator watching a trapped bird in the Newark airport is so moved by its predicament that she grows wings) or mechanical exercises in building psychological and suspense (a sneering young man plots to publicly embarrass the famous father who never acknowledged him).
Other stories, "Spotted Hyenas: A Romance," and "Anniversary," concern downward-trending older women, their interior funks and their desperate efforts to overcome the unremitting demands of motherhood, marriage and careers.
These stories, so very different in premise and action, attest to Oates' always impressive range, but a minor detail suggests a symptomatic flaw. Both lead characters wear black cashmere-and-wool combinations. This could be an intentional. Then again, it might simply be rote prose from a writer so practiced at what she does so well that the struggle for a new angle of approach is long gone, even if that doesn't stop her from going on and on.
The stories in this collection generally involve a combination of macabre events, fantastical turns and unguarded first-person storytelling. Oates explores the rough fortunes of (mostly) women who think they're in control of their situations but are proved wrong, sometimes brutally so.
The title story juxtaposes two aspiring starlets from 1940s Los Angeles. One, Elizabeth Short, was rechristened "the Black Dahlia" by the gutter press during a lurid murder investigation occasioned by the discovery of her mangled body, split apart at the torso. In Oates' rendition, Betty speaks from beyond the grave about how she lived and died, and also offers a catty running commentary on her roommate, a certain Norma Jeane Baker.
This fragile "White Rose" interests a strange, shy doctor who secretly attends their photo shoots and eventually invites both women to dinner. Wiser and (by her own flawed reckoning) more alluring, Betty deceitfully gets the doctor all to herself, and while he's kissing, chloroforming and butchering her, we hear from Norma Jeane, upset as Betty has failed to pick her up from the bar where they'd planned to meet.
With its strong contrast of dark and light sensibilities, voices and fates, this first story seems to offer an interpretive key to the rest of the collection. But few of the following stories sustain that much scrutiny.
The weaker ones read like strained experiments (a narrator watching a trapped bird in the Newark airport is so moved by its predicament that she grows wings) or mechanical exercises in building psychological and suspense (a sneering young man plots to publicly embarrass the famous father who never acknowledged him).
Other stories, "Spotted Hyenas: A Romance," and "Anniversary," concern downward-trending older women, their interior funks and their desperate efforts to overcome the unremitting demands of motherhood, marriage and careers.
These stories, so very different in premise and action, attest to Oates' always impressive range, but a minor detail suggests a symptomatic flaw. Both lead characters wear black cashmere-and-wool combinations. This could be an intentional. Then again, it might simply be rote prose from a writer so practiced at what she does so well that the struggle for a new angle of approach is long gone, even if that doesn't stop her from going on and on.
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