Joyce Carol Oates: Middle Age: A Romance

By JOHN McCRYSTAL

If you want someone to lay bare the big, empty heart of contemporary America, then you're usually directed to people like Tom Wolfe or Don Delillo, or going back a little, Thomas Pynchon or John Steinbeck.

Well, here's another, if you haven't already found her.

This is a book which begins with the death of its main character.

Adam Berendt is an artist and amateur philosopher who lives, grizzled, shambling and affable, on the fringes of the tight-knit, well-to-do social circle of the residents of Salthill-on-Hudson, New York.

One day he drowns while trying to rescue a child who has been tipped into the river by the capsize of her boat.

While he has always been something of a loner, his death galvanises the complacent Salthill community, particularly the female part of it, to whom the ruggedly handsome, distant and (they presume) profound Berendt has proved irresistible.

The impact of his death spreads through their lives like the ripples from the splash of a stone in a pool.

Marina Troy, a shy, beautiful redhead who at 38 is the youngest of the Salthill set, witnesses an obviously forged version of Adam's will at the request of her co-executor, Roger Cavanagh, with whom she has, in the confusion of the moment, an abortive sexual encounter.

Shame provides the motive and Adam's bequest to her of a property in the mountains the opportunity to get out of Salthill, to take her unrequited love for Adam and brood in solitude.

Roger himself, in the process of being rejected by his loathsome daughter, the only offspring of his failed marriage, becomes involved with a young, aggressively modern colleague who falls pregnant to him.

He is manipulated into entering a contract with her regarding the baby's future: so badly does he want the chance to bring up the child well that he writes out large cheques on demand, even as he begins to suspect he is being preyed upon.

Lionel, the chief executive of his flourishing family publishing company, does get preyed upon, tantalised by the prospect of rejuvenating his sex life into leaving his wife, Camille who, devastated, is drawn inexorably to other wounded creatures, namely stray dogs, with which she fills the stately marital home.

Abigail, the best-looking and most eligible of the Salthill women, divorced and available, tries obsessively to get close to her teenage son Jared and nearly kills them both in a car accident.

He will not forgive her, and breaks off all contact, driving her to the brink of suicide.

Her compassion at the sight of a lonely-looking Asian-American girl she sees in the street the day after she found herself unable to kill herself brings her back.

Augusta, whom most of the other wives suspect was Adam Berendt's lover, abruptly leaves her husband, Owen, and their airless, mummified marriage to go wandering through the Mid-west in search of information about Adam's past.

These narratives radiate out from the central event of Adam's death, crossing, re-crossing and interlacing.

Like the interference pattern created by colliding wave systems, there are patches of light and dark in this wonderfully managed multiple narrative.

It's a big book which will keep you going through the holidays. I found it difficult to get into, but this was temporary only.

It's compulsive reading: will Roger get his baby, and will his attraction to Marina ever be requited?

Will Marina shake her obsession with the departed Adam?

What will happen when Lionel returns to Camille with her houseful of dogs, given he is allergic and hates them? Will poor Abigail ever be happy again, now that she has been abandoned by everyone she holds dear?

And is it really Augusta's headless, mutilated corpse that Owen is summoned to Florida to identify? Will these narrow-thinking, selfish folk be shocked by their encounter with death into leading worthwhile lives?

Oates writes with remarkable control and vigour and a beautiful, acerbic wit. You won't find more effective use of quotation marks to pull out and sneer at banal or trendy turns of phrase than here.

And overall? In one passage about a ballet to which Abigail goes, Oates playfully writes: "It is lushly romantic, with dissonant, post-modern interludes, a jazzy-sexy beat, but at the end romantic again, and resolved. No ambiguity here: this is the triumph of wish-fulfilment".

I couldn't have put it better myself.

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.

* Fourth Estate, $34.95