I Am No One You Know by Joyce Carol Oates. Wow, with this staggeringly excellent collection of short stories, I instantly become a slavishly devoted, humongous Joyce Carol Oates fan. Previously, I'd danced around the edge of the whole Joyce Carol Oates question. She's an author with a reputation for writing way too much in far too many genres. She writes so much that there are people in the literary community who figure, "how good, after all, can she be?" She's churning them out like Lee Child or Danielle Steel, for crissakes.
Then there's the "problem" with her subject matter. As a writer of "serious" literature, she devotes a lot of pages to writing about sensational, low-brow themes: serial killers, kidnap victims, abused children, abused women, criminals—all the stuff that most people expect to find in popular fiction or on the true crime shelf. This is precisely the kind of stuff you find in "I Am No One You Know."
A divorced woman poet becomes pen-pals with a convict. Another woman tells us what she won't even tell her husband: that as a teenager she was abducted and held captive as a sex-slave for a week by a deranged serial killer. A daughter returns for the funeral of her father who died in a fire she suspects may have been arson—a fire set by her own brother.
Another daughter is disowned by her family for testifying against siblings involved in the senseless, brutal slaying of a local black student. A forensic expert—this time a man—falls in "love" with the female skull of an unidentified murder victim he's charged with reconstructing. Another man descends into the hell of of an old age home to visit his father and finds a monster from his childhood among its denizens.
A brother and sister go back to the house where one horrible, unforgettable night they witnessed their father beat their mother to death on the beach with a hammer—but whose version of the events of that night, which has haunted and deformed the rest of their lives, is correct?
Alcoholics, teachers (male and female) who have sex with their underage students, ex-death row prisoners, bad mothers, bad fathers, bad children, family dynamics as fucked up as those in any Greek tragedy—Oates often writes not only about tawdry subjects but about tawdry characters. This isn't going to win her any support among those who believe that the mark of great literature, especially where literary prizes are to be awarded, is that it should be elevating. Instead a typical Joyce Carol Oates story seeks to illuminate the darkest of characters and situations. Her admittedly gothic sensibility seems to draw her inevitably to the transgressive. She's often compared to Poe. I don't know about that. Those who make the comparison may be grasping at a justification for including Oates in the great canon of American writers. I don't think she needs such justification. The intelligence that she brings to even the skankiest of subjects and the skill and artistry with which she wields that intelligence through one daring, high-wire virtuoso prose performance after another are what separates Joyce Carol Oates from a James Patterson.
I'd say I admire Oates the courage to risk literary life and limb and to court critical marginalization in order to follow her inclination—call it her "muse" if you like—into the dark and unsavory basements of human nature. Except isn't that what a serious writer should do? Shouldn't that be the default setting? And yet so often it isn't. Instead most writers that take themselves seriously take the safest route possible to publication and critical acceptance. They write as if they took all their material not from life, but from MFA programs and writing workshops, where they learned how to craft and cook that material up into the most blandly palatable of broths—a kind of Campbell's soup of fiction—no matter how distasteful the original raw ingredients. They've boiled the rankness right out of it.
Joyce Carol Oates leaves in the wild gaminess.
She flirts with and crosses the line. She writes with a sympathy for the murderer, the mad, and the maddened that might be mistaken for a condoning of their sins and crimes. She isn't afraid of being called out for siding with the abuser, the outcast, the misfit, the politically incorrect. Or, if she is afraid, she soldiers on all the same. She writes about human beings pushed to the extreme outer limits of human emotion. In this regard, if she resembles anyone, she resembles the Emily Bronte of "Wuthering Heights" more than she does Poe; for one thing, she understands the violence and injustice that social stratification engenders. Oates speaks from the place where words customarily begin to fail, where we often say "there are no words to describe this pain, this horror, this madness."
And she does this by writing not only about diverse subjects, not only about a wide range of human characters, but in many different voices and styles. She writes from the point of view of men and women, rich and poor, the articulate and the otherwise mute. She gives voice to sharp young female poets and elderly male college professors, semi-literate ex-convicts and upper-middle class housewives in prose that is pitch-perfect nearly every time.
Pulitzer-prize-winning author Jane Smiley said this of Joyce Carol Oates: "Like J.S. Bach, Oates often seems to be working in private, cultivating the variety and complexity of her vision in service to something larger than a literary career."
That's a great way to put it, which is why I put it here. Thanks, Jane Smiley. But to that, again, I'd be inclined to snap back, "So what?" Isn't that the way it's supposed to be? Shouldn't that be the way all literary artists work? Except it hardly ever is that way. All too many literary artists are literary careerists. One might argue that Oates is a literary careerist, too; after all, she's made a career out of being a writer and a professor. To that I'd say, "Yes, but she didn't compromise. She did it her way."
Which is why I'm a huge Joyce Carol Oates fan. I'd be surprised if she won a Nobel Prize. Not because she doesn't deserve one, but because the Nobel, as it is presently awarded, how it is presently constituted and what it presently represents, doesn't deserve her.
If Joyce Carol Oates is fated to be marginalized, to dwell on the circumference of the inner circle of great writers, to be locked like the madwoman in the cellar of the literary pantheon, or given a table at the end of the table, a slightly embarrassing, grudgingly acknowledged "poor" relation, that's all the more to her credit in my opinion.
And I get the feeling that Joyce Carol Oates isn't too upset by it either. That she's too busy following the next illuminating sentence down the rabbit hole and into the twisting labyrinth of human experience no matter how dark, no matter to what unmarked grave or uncharted hell it might lead.
No comments:
Post a Comment