Joyce Carol Oates: The Tattooed Girl

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Surely Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prolific of writers, the impression that there's a new Oates novel every few months borne out by the intimidating, type-blackened "Also by ... " page at the beginning of this latest one, the 39th since 1964. And that's just the novels: by the time we've counted through short-story collections, novellas, poetry, plays, essays and children's books, the total rises by a further 48.

But the really extraordinary thing about Oates is that the quality of her writing is not diluted by its own mass. Her imagination does not run dry; her language does not revolve in on itself; her characters are startling individuals who emerge full of idiosyncrasy and peculiar, one-off detail.

In Tattooed Girl she creates the hellish worlds of Alma Busch (she of the title) and Joshua Seigl - two desperate characters who couldn't be more unlike each other, brought together purely because each for the other represents a kind of fulcrum of desire and false fantasy.

Joshua Seigl is a 38-year-old best-selling author and intellectual, the beneficiary of a trust fund who lives alone in an exclusive suburb in upstate New York. He is discreet, private, enigmatic, emotionally unsusceptible. One day, though, he discovers he no longer wants to live alone, and so he employs an assistant. Thus does the unlikely Alma enter his world: a lost soul with an indistinct past who has been the victim of a tattoo attack by unknown assailants. She comes from "Hell, PA", the town of Akron, Pennsylvania, below which fires have burned in mines for many years.

Seigl, on the other hand, is hard at work translating Virgil's Aeneid, which of course includes a famous descent into hell and segues, historically, into Dante's Inferno, around which Virgil becomes the host. Seigl is about to descend into the personal hell of a degenerative nerve disease.

Oates' real power is that her story, in its confined setting, nevertheless plays out much larger themes: of the Holocaust, and Holocaust denial, of family history and sibling relationships, of hatred across the social classes.

The manic energy of the increasingly ill Seigl, the craziness of his sister Jet ("fierce and implacable. Will disguised as a moral principle") and the excoriating hatred of Alma, push the story off the radar of polite society and into bleak and dangerous territory. Only a melodramatic ending will suffice.

* Fourth Estate, $34.99