FICTION
Another walk on the dark side with Joyce Carol Oates
Published: April 19, 2009, 7:51 am
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Joyce Carol Oates is always disturbing. She cannot be read with comfort. Nor can she be put down — and this is her great gift.
It is a gift at once repelling and compelling — and perhaps never more so than in “Dear Husband,” her latest collection of short stories.
For here, in 14 unforgettable stops on Oates’ never-ending journey to the depths of the human psyche, she probes depression, terror, malice, disregard, loss, alienation, despair and, perhaps most of all, shame.
The shame of human failure, real or perceived, is at the heart of the horrific title story, “Dear Husband,” a tale in the form of a letter from one Lauri Lynn McKeon to her husband — the fictional Lauri Lynn, like the real Andrea Yates, having just drowned her five children in the bathtub.
“God has instructed me, and Jesus Christ has guided my hand,” Lauri writes of killing the children, “one by one,” and finding that drowning them “was not so very different from bathing them, for always they kicked and splashed, and whimpered and whined, and made such ugly faces. . ”
This story, blessedly, appears last on Oates’ long walk here on the dark side. But it is not the first story in the collection wherein a young mother unravels, and decides to kill her young.
“The Heart Sutra,” clearly the best of the lot, also deals with a woman who views herself as both inadequate and a victim of indifference. This story, named for “the oldest and most beautiful of all the sutras,” takes place mainly in the mind of Serena Dayinka, paramour of the poet Andre Gatteau and mother of their 15-month-old son. Andre has apparently left Serena and the child and they have been holed up in a beautiful home graciously lent to them until “things are sorted out with Andre.”
Serena, sleepless and in shock, has neglected the beautiful home, has even defiled it and is now eying the “nine glittering knives” in the kitchen, “these instruments of savage beauty taunting Serena Dayinka to look, to see. Lurid as pornographic images, obscene in display. . ”
Serena’s intention for the knives is clear: “If I can’t make this man love me,” she thinks, “I will make this man hate me. I will pierce his stony heart.”
Page after terrifying page, Serena’s madness mounts, forcing even her to notice: “Because it is happening continuously without end as the Heart Sutra is forever being chanted it has not happened yet in the borrowed house on Edgehill Lane.”
It is impossible not to wonder at Oates, being so clearly drawn to the lurid, the hidden, the unsettling, the shameful — and, ultimately, the unspeakable. Perhaps it is as Serena tells herself about Andre: “All poets secret their deepest selves in their art.”
More probably, it is Oates being — in terms of the human condition — the finest chronicler of our times.
For, while these stories may be extreme, the psychological core of each holds a human truth. To find it, we must step out from behind the veneer of civilization — and into the raw intimacy of others’ lives.
“Panic,” the first story in “Dear Husband,” is a case in point. Here, a young couple and their child face sudden menace on the highway — and the father, a corporate lawyer, does not emerge a hero.
In an instant, the quality of the little family’s life is altered and the father filled with shame and self-doubt — emotions so toxic and strong in Oates’ hands that they are contagious to the reader.
That the husband and wife here are named Charles and Camilla shows us, as well, the playful side of Oates — who does the same in another chilling tale, “Suicide by Fitness Center,” featuring, among others, a wife called “Mrs. Eggplant Man.”
Here, where “the lighting is a faded tea tint,” a woman plans her withdrawal from life. In “Special,” the 9-year-old sister of a “dangerous” special-needs child, needs a disfiguring accident before she feels noticed in the family. In “The Blind Man’s Sighted Daughters,” two sisters with different roles, (think Mary and Martha of the Bible), face their father’s impending death, one believing that, years ago, he murdered not only his mistress — a woman who wore lipstick “so dark it looked like a black wound” — but another of the mistress’ lovers as well.
It is in this story that Oates reflects her Western New York roots, referring at times to Buffalo and the “Chautauqua Mountains.”
Several tales here, including the haunting “Magda Maria,” deal with drug and alcohol addiction in such venues as “the River House where time oozed, bent, collapsed. . . ”
Mothers and sons, adolescents, class distinction, the alienated and the unstable all figure in these powerful tales.
“A Princeton Idyll” is set in “late winter when the snow looks like used Kleenex,” and involves an increasingly chilling correspondence between a former family servant and the granddaughter of the well-known man the servant once worked for.
“Cutty Sark” deals with the wonder of a boy at the famous clipper ship known for its speed and beauty, as well as its namesake- in-the-bottle, which the boy’s mother depends upon for the illusion of speed and beauty.
Even the titles of the stories here suggest foreboding—“Vigilante,” “Landfill,” Mistrial.” Two alarming pieces, “Dear Joyce Carol,” and “The Glazers” manage to avoid catastrophe but keep you steeled to the end.
Most of these stories, Oates informs us in her acknowledgments, originally appeared “frequently in different forms” in such magazines as The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s and the Yale Review. And, yes, there is terribleness and failure in each one, provoking shame so real it burns to read them.
But read them we do because they are by Joyce Carol Oates— whose way with words is flat out irresistible.
Dear Husband, Stories By Joyce Carol Oates Ecco 326 pages, $24.99
Karen Brady is a retired News columnist.
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