Mania: Storiesby Joyce Carol Oates
Whether emerging in dark Gothic stories or pervading a sunny suburban world, fear haunts the imagination of Joyce Carol Oates – a writer who “never recovered from fear and disgust in familiar surroundings,” as her admirer John Updike once said. Such is the case with the nine narratives in “The Frenzy,” the 49th story collection (with over 60 novels!) published by this fantastically prolific author.
These pieces deal with complex emergencies and wounds, both physical and mental. In “Refuge,” a woman’s philandering husband disappears under mysterious circumstances, prompting a rescue effort that deepens the mystery. “The Bicycle Accident” is the story of a 13-year-old girl who is seriously injured while fleeing a family party – and, possibly, sexually abused at the hands of a guest.
Oates’s tales are steeped in crime and foreboding. “The Redwoods” takes a familiar romantic trope – a chance encounter that persists over the years as a path not taken – and gives it a sinister twist. Is the hero a spiritual seeker… or an obsessive would-be stalker?
In the book’s title story, a married man named Cassidy moves quietly to the Jersey Shore with his teenage mistress, the daughter of a couple with whom he and his wife socialize. As they drive away, Cassidy contemplates the deep disidentification of himself (“His life has been an impersonation of someone he didn’t know”), even as he excitedly anticipates his lover’s “polite” acceptance of “whatever Cassidy will do with him.” Our sense of anxiety is heightened by vaguely ominous details: “A piece of driftwood resembling a human arm; a child’s sneaker washed and yellowed by the surf.” Like horror movies, these stories are most transformative when nothing has happened yet.
Halfway through the collection, I found myself yearning for a plot in which violence and loss played no role. But Oates is adamant. One story presents a harrowing account of a girl’s injuries in a car accident. Another observes the cruelty that cancer brings to a child’s face (“A face that would have been broken into two asymmetrical halves, then put back together again like broken crockery.”) Oates is a highly cinematic writer, and we navigate these passages feeling the urge to cover our eyes.
And violence is not limited to physical harm. Oats are found everywhere. In “Night Fishing at Antibes” widowhood is depicted as a “devastated state”, with the protagonist imagining herself as “an invalid, walking around with one leg and crutches”. The birth of a child awakens in a parent’s mind the thought that “no matter how big this child grows, he will always be an infant with soft bones, with a fontanel on the top of his head through which life can stick its cruel thumb at any turn.” With oats, eating can also be scary; A woman, lying awake at night worrying about what to serve at a dinner party, experiences a kind of culinary terror: “The entire menu rose and fell in her mind like a foaming waterfall. Appetizers, snacks, desserts were making her blood feverish.”
Oates’s prose comes with certain peculiarities: concise sentences that give off a strange, breathless quality; Author details in parentheses; multiple choice options stated through “if/when”; a liberal sprinkling of exclamation marks; and a strange habit of seemingly random italicization (“Juliet knew they were not twins. In reality they were not even sisters but were called something cousin“”).
Yet these stories are nothing if not fascinating. Whatever the dire crisis they face, they are driven by a dark, relentless force. You want to continue reading. Even when the eyes are half covered.
frenzy: : stories | by Joyce Carol Oates | hogarth | 318 pp. | $32
