Sourland by Joyce Carol Oates
HarperCollins $49.99 hardback
It's been six months since the last Joyce Carol Oates, so it's not surprising to find she has another book out. Her productivity is astonishing, she's Barbara Cartland in black instead of pink. Plus the other little difference is that Oates at her best writes sublimely.
Does the quantity of her work compromise its quality? Yes, on occasions. She can be Gothic to the point of being grotesque.
The hectic drive of her narrators' thoughts can become repetitive and self-indugent. You find both those flaws in this collection of 15 stories plus one near-novella.
Like many of Oates' characters, the people of Sourland live lives that have suddenly lurched into extremis.
A father collapses and a family is "stricken"; a girl walks out of school and offers herself to her scarred cousin; a drunken father condemns his daughter to perpetual pity.
Bereavement is a recurrent motif (Oates' first husband died two years ago, and she's acknowledged the trauma of his death). So one woman is flung into a surreal ordeal at a Probate Office, while another breaks all her rules and travels to a frozen wilderness cabin with a disfigured face from her past.
Widows are the protagonists in several stories. They're abruptly alone in a predatory world; they carry solitary confinement within themselves (thank you, Tennessee Williams). They suffer in ways which are sometimes a perverse expiation of guilt and occasionally an equally perverse triumph. There's the woman who invites a bizarre man into her house for a drink, and who when he sexually and horribly assaults her, seems to welcome it as a delayed retribution.
JCO is seldom a comfortable read. Individual lives are always precarious. Violence flickers and flares. A pedestrian is butchered on a New York street; a high school boy is stoned to death in a ravine; a child burrows under a huge boulder as his half-crazed father scrabbles after him.
Sexuality is depicted as grotesque, brutish, mutilated. Landscapes echo the human condition. Cities are ramshackle, inimical, "corroded"; the countryside is savagely frozen or a teeming morass.
What makes Oates much more than a chronicler of shock and schlock is her unsentimental empathy for people pushed to and over the edge, combined with the unflinching impetus of her plots, and the feverish, almost hallucinatory prose in which she narrates them. There are few easy endings here, and certainly no sentimental ones.
The stories of Sourland are an unsettling, insistent exploration of the precariousness of safety and sanity. They're lifted from absolute blackness by a wounded sympathy for the world's victims, which to JCO seems to include most of us.
In spite of the occasional wobble, they're a dark and daring literary achievement.
