Joyce Carol Oates: I'll take you there

By JOHN McCrystal

If things work out between us, American master novelist Joyce Carol Oates promises us in the last line of this book, someday I'll take you there.

And take us there she does.

This is Syracuse University in the early 60s, where the nameless narrator is studying philosophy at the same time she is emerging as a personality.

She's young. The timeframe covered by the novel is the three turbulent years between her first days at Syracuse and a point a little after her 20th birthday. She's bright but socially crippled, the result of growing up in a family who have never managed to forgive her for causing her mother's death in childbirth. She desperately wants to be accepted by her peers in the Kappa Gamma Pi sorority to which, to her shock, she is admitted; but she grows more alienated from them, even as she begins to realise that her sisters have accepted her into their company solely for her academic ability, so that she can rescue their shoddy assignments while they get on with the serious business of partying.

Then, of course, she falls in love, with Vernor Matheius, a doctoral student in philosophy who happens to be black. She is willing to suffer disapproval, social and official, for this unseemly liaison, but harder to weather is Vernor's acute self-absorption. She knows she is being used, but allows it. She knows it can't last, and it doesn't.

Finally, she is summoned to the bedside of her dying father, who abandoned the family some years before and whom she had believed to be dead already. Perversely, the death of her surviving parent presents her with deliverance from the psychological burden she has laboured under since the death of her mother.

I'll Take You There is a masterpiece of characterisation, not only of the main character, but of the peripheral characters as well: Mrs Thayer, the prim, quietly despairing English sorority housemother; Vernor Matheius, the smouldering, selfish black man who has found in the lofty reaches of philosophy a place to escape from his background and the storm surrounding race issues which is gathering strength.

The narrator's character is developed through Oates' sheer control of technique. Giddy and breathless at first, resolute and assured at last, the writing depicts the painful process of coming-of-age pitch-perfectly. We don't learn her name, but as Wittgenstein could assure us, names are merely signifiers and do not give us access to the substance of the named. Instead of learning what she is called we find out who she is.

There's a slow-burning fury underlying it. Men don't come out of it that well. Vernor, the narrator's father, and the male philosophers whom she is studying, whose passionate intelligence and rigorous logic have no purchase on the tumult of real lives. "All philosophy is boastfulness, at bottom," the narrator decides. "How indifferent it was to such wisdom, the world. The world entering through feet, fingers, touch." Women don't come out of it that well, either. Yet both men and women are shown capable of redemption.

Increasingly, Oates is being placed at the forefront of contemporary American novelists. This book is further evidence of the justice of this estimation. If you had to devise a feminine counterpart to A Catcher in the Rye, this is as close as you could get. It is a brilliant depiction of what it is to live in a world where we can't be certain that things will work out between us.

* Fourth Estate $34.99

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.