Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“THE DOLL-MASTER and other tales of terror” by Joyce Carol Oates (Mysterious Press / Head of Zeus – Harper/Collins, $NZ24:99)

            Recently I read a profile of the American novelist and short-story writer Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938). It began by saying that, when reviewers deal with her, they always have to admit that they have read only a fraction of her work. There is a reason for this. Since the early 1960s, Oates has produced over 90 books, including fifty novels. She averages nearly two books a year and it would take a couple of years to read her complete works.

Her productivity drives some people wild.

The late neurotic and insecure scribbler Gore Vidal, who spent his public life posing as a world-weary patrician, was big on bitchy one-liners and put-downs. The story goes that when asked what the three most dispiriting words in the English language were, he replied “Joyce Carol Oates”. For those who have read none of her work, this is a good enough excuse to ignore her. For myself, I have, like most people, read only a few of her books, but at the very least I have found them entertaining, even if they do sometimes go on a bit. (Find elsewhere on this blog reviews of Joyce Carol Oates’ Gothic vampire novel The Accursed and her short-story collection Black Dahlia& White Rose).

            Oates’ latest production The Doll-Master and other tales of terror comprises six longish short stories (all about forty or fifty pages in length). All are more or less in the thriller or suspense mode, though I think it’s stretching it a bit to call then “tales of terror”. I would say that only one of them really terrified me. The rest gave a slight frisson of impending doom, but no real terror. All were previously published in magazines, as is the way with Oates’ story collections, with fully half of them first appearing in the venerable Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

            The title story “The Doll-Master” is told in the first-person by Robbie who, when he was a little boy, was separated from the little girl he liked who owned a doll. Robbie became obsessed with dolls, hiding his obsession from his macho father who wanted him to play with action men. The story develops with his collecting and hiding dolls he has found, until he is of college student age. His voice is the voice of a psychopath. This is creepy up to a point, but regrettably, the story comes to a punch-line which reveals too much and shows much of the story to have been trickery at the reader’s expense. I am surprised that it is the weakest entry that gives the volume its title.

            “Soldier” is once again told in the first-person voice of a disturbed male, 30-year-old Brandon who is awaiting trial for what some characterise as a race-hate-crime. He shot dead a black teenager, but he seems to sincerely believe that he was being threatened by a gang and acted in self-defence. In part, Joyce Carol Oates is satirising both the hysteria of social media and those who promote racial violence. Awaiting trial, Brandon gets hate mail but also mail telling him that he is a hero. A wealthy gun manufacturer pays for his defence and a TV company offers big money to dramatise his life story. Because this is in the first-person, we believe we are privileged to see how Brandon’s mind really works. It is clear that his upbringing (fundamentalist Protestant church; gun-toting ex-cop uncle) has influenced the way he thinks. It is also clear that he has limited intelligence. When shown a large denomination banknote he says “It is the first time I have seen and touched a hundred-dollar bill with the face of Benjamin Franklin on it – I think he is one of the U. S. presidents of a long time ago.” He puts common phrases, unfamiliar to himself, in inverted commas (“defence team” etc) the way the semi-literate sometimes do, and at one point he admits that he has never travelled further than the next county. We tend to pity him rather than despise him. But Oates pulls a switch in the last few pages of this 40-page story which so totally changes the psychological landscape that it is hard not to think we have suffered a prolonged confidence trick. I am left wondering if Joyce Carol Oates set out to explore in detail the mind of a killer, but than backed out into a compromise ending.

            “Gun Accident – An Investigation” is yet again in the first-person, but this time it is a woman’s voice. This is an ambitious story. The middle-aged woman Hanna, married with children, conveys the sense of trauma that still shakes her when she comes back to the neighbourhood she grew up in. She always recalls an awful event that happened to her as a teenager. There is a great and long (possibly over-long) build-up to the revelation that when she was house-sitting for a neighbour, burglars broke in on her and mistreated her intimately. I think Oates’ purpose here is to deal with the life-long psychological after-effects of such an event rather than with the brutal event itself. Yet, coming as the story’s late climax, the event is still a sensational shocker and that is probably a good description of the story’s effect

            “Equatorial” is told in the third person, but it is the third-person-limited in which we see the thoughts of only one character, Audrey. She is the wife of an academic, Henry, accompanying him on a guided tour to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. She feels inadequate. She is not an academic as most of the tour party is. She is Henry’s third wife and he is her second husband. Could it be that their marriage is falling apart? Could it be that Henry has found another woman? Indeed could it be that Henry is trying to kill her? Was he actually tying to knock her off balance when they came down that steep mountain path in Ecuador? Did he want to push her into the sea from the “moon deck” of their cruise ship? And is that sleek, young Asian woman academic in their tour party Henry’s new lover, because Audrey thinks she’s seen the woman with Henry before? As a suspense story, this one reminds me very much of the ancient Hitchcock film Suspicion, in which a wife spends the whole movie fearing that her husband intends to kill her, and we are not sure if she is right or simply too imaginative. Given that premise, it works reasonably well as suspense (and of course I am not the sort of cad to tell you how it turns out). But Joyce Carol Oates seems to want it to say something more. Henry is usually called “the husband” and Audrey “the wife”, as if they are types of marital insecurity. And in the Galapagos Islands section there’s a lot of talk about natural selection (it’s Darwin country, folks) and whether the fittest really do survive – which Audrey relates to her own fraught situation. But while it’s a good time-passer, I see it as a suspense story with pretensions.

            For me, “Big Momma” is the one real tale of terror in the book, with suspense built up slowly to a grisly ending. Again, it is written in the third-person-limited voice, with us sharing the thoughts and viewpoint of Violet. She is an awkward only child, friendless at school and neglected by her mother who is often out late.  But a nice man takes an interest in Violet and often drives her to his home, where she enjoys the company of other children, especially as the man is the father of one of her classmates. Gosh, the man is nice to her. He strokes the nape of her neck affectionately… and if you at this point think you know where this unsettling story is going, you are quite wrong. At about midway point it introduces us to something bizarre and horrifying, taking us down quite a different path. I can’t spike its surprise by saying anything further. It works very well as a horror story. There is nothing more that need be said about it.

            “Mystery Inc.”, on the other hand, dips into a rather more genteel form of horror – indeed a somewhat retro one. The first-person narrator is the disgruntled owner of a chain of failing second-hand bookshops. He plans to murder the owner of an upmarket antiquarian bookstore, which he hopes to take over. His voice is fussy, pedantic and self-justifying and we lose much confidence in him when, less than a third of the way through the story, we learn that he has disguised himself from his intended murder victim by donning a red wig and false glasses. Surely the owner of a shop specialising in murder-mystery books would rapidly see through such a disguise?! It is not only the antique bookstore setting, but also the story’s development that makes it appear most like the old-fashioned “cosy” variety of murder story – like those which appeared in the very same antique novels and mystery magazines that line the bookshop’s shelves and are referenced in the text.  This cosiness is reinforced by the  way so much of the story is conveyed in a long conversation between the would-be murderer and his intended victim.

            Is there any distinctive voice of Joyce Carol Oates in these stories?

            Not really. They are the work of an author who knows how to adapt herself to the requirements of publications that accept her work, and proof that she can turn her hand to mystery and murder stories, some with odd psychological kinks. Cornell Woolrich and Patricia Highsmith did the kinks better than she does, but she is entertaining.

            Which is no less than I expected of her.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“THE ACCURSED” by Joyce Carol Oates (Fourth Estate /Harper-Collins, $NZ34:99)

Gentle Reader, imagine my shame and embarrassment when I began reading The Accursed, latest tome by the famous book-writing machine which goes by the name of Joyce Carol Oates.

Here it was, a fat paperback of some 667 pages, and with a cover showing a snow-white female chin above a snow-white lace collar, with blood dribbling from the crimson lips; and with the title The Accursed printed in bold blood-red Gothic type. And above the title, at least on the copy that I had, the slogan “The sins of the fathers. The souls of the innocent”.

I scarcely dared let anyone see what I was reading, as it looked so like airport-lounge Gothic or a variant of the Twilight series that is marketed to younger teenage girls.

And, Gentle Reader, much of the novel delivered exactly what the cover promised its more innocent purchasers. It does indeed include a Curse – also known as the Crosswicks Curse or The Unspeakable – which descends upon a small community and causes much mayhem and many scenes of extreme horror or violence. These include the ghost of a recently deceased young girl coming back to haunt members of her family! A bride abducted from her wedding by a Phantom Bridegroom and spirited away to a demon kingdom (the “Bog Kingdom”) ruled by a Demon Prince! A shape-shifter who is now the Phantom Bridegroom; and now Sherlock Holmes inciting a dotty professor to commit murder; and now a suave European count of evil intent! Girls in a ladies’ seminary who have hysterics at the sight of demon snakes! And a husband who, amid blood-soaked bed-sheets, goes berserk and murders his wife with an electric fan! And a homosexual vampire, feasting on university students! And a father who is just prevented from murdering an infant after demon voices have spoken to him! And to add to the Gothic tone, an idiot boy who seems imbecilic but has access to the Demon Kingdom and to all the occult matters that those elder and wiser cannot fathom.

So very Gothic.

Like many genuine Gothic novels (you can go back to the days of James Hogg, Anne Radcliffe and E.T.A.Hoffmann for this one), The Accursed purports to be an account of real events as “edited” by an historian - in this case, one M.W.van Dyck, looking back on the demonic visitations from eighty years later.

But here is the twist. The whole tale unfolds at Princeton University in homely, un-demonic New Jersey, in 1905-06. Those characters who are most afflicted by the Curse are the fictitious children of the fictitious Presbyterian minister Winslow Slade. The young woman spirited away by a Demon Bridegroom is the Reverend Slade’s daughter Annabel Slade, who was about to make a fashionable marriage to the dashing southern Lieutenant Dabney Bayard. Alongside these fictitious characters, however, The Accursed has many extended portraits of real historical figures. Former US President Grover Cleveland. Future US President (and president of Princeton University) Woodrow Wilson. And journalist, novelist and Socialist muckraker Upton Sinclair. And blowhard novelist Jack London. And others too numinous to mention.

There are passages that could be regarded as straight reportage, especially when the novel considers the manners and attitudes of the Princeton student body, thus:

“There was a spirit of forced camaraderie among the Princeton boys – or as they wished to think of themselves, young men. As if nothing mattered so much as one another: to be respected, to be liked, to be admired, to be ‘popular’. Grades scarcely mattered – if you studied you were mocked as a poler. A gentleman had no need of a grade beyond “C” – for a gentleman was not going to make his living by his wits, surely. And so you joined a club, or two clubs; or three. You went out for sports as others did, in an affable herd….” (p.83)

Yet for all its many documentary moments, there is no point in trying to unpick this novel in purely historical terms. It simply isn’t an historical novel in any conventional sense, but a lurid fantasia on historical themes. Therefore one cannot cry “Foul!” at the sight of any anachronisms.

But what exactly is Joyce Carol Oates doing with this melding of Gothic excess and historical verisimilitude?

Predictably, the whole thing is a postmodern exercise, self-referential and a veritable Chinese box of unreliable narrators. Our historian M.W.van Dyck, writing in 1986, is a stuffy, pompous, pedantic old man, endlessly passing judgements on characters and events (often in footnotes) in ways that show him to be snobbish, mildly racist and quite out of touch with his own times. Annabel Slade’s diary of her abduction (especially pp.264 ff.) is pure Gothick pastiche. By contrast the quoted diary of one Adelaide McLean Burr, a hypochondriac, neurotic campus wife, is a collection of period prejudices and fads - she follows Theosophy, hates trade unions and the working classes, and yet blithely rejoices in the revolutionary anarchist theories of Bakhunin as if they are the latest drawing-room fashion.

So, we have to conclude, part of Joyce Carol Oates’ purpose is purely stylistic. She is indulging the fun of writing in different styles.

But you cannot read this fat volume without seeing much of its Gothic as metaphorical. Unless you want to take the hauntings, the vampirism and the demons at face value (and you’re allowed to do that if you want), its hard to see them as anything other than symbols of what ailed and haunted America’s intellectual life a century ago – the nasty things in the USA’s historical DNA. Those who are “The Accursed” may be Americans who have this heritage.

The portraits of America’s leaders are unflattering. Grover Cleveland is an obese fool, who gets stuck in a window frame when trying to pursue the ghost of his daughter. When he turns up late in the novel, hosting a White House dinner, President Teddy Roosevelt is a gluttonous, boastful bellower. More central to the action is the pompous, hypersensitive, nerve-strained Woodrow Wilson, who takes a whole pharmacopeia of drugs to soothe his nerves and who sees conspiracies against himself everywhere. He is shriekingly as odds with another academic administrator, Dean Andrew West, over precedence and the building of a graduate school.

Up in New Jersey, Princeton is still a bastion of prim southern Presbyterian intellectuals with a high sense of their own moral worth. Yet, as Oates depicts them, they are really a perverse lot. They are profoundly racist. They do not like that vulgar Ku Klux Klan, but in the privacy of their own homes, they secretly approve when they hear of a nearby lynching. It keeps the Negroes in their proper place, after all. They have a neurotic fear of “race-mixing”. In one early scene, Woodrow Wilson conspires to have a member of staff dismissed when it is suspected that he may have some black ancestry. They barely tolerate Jews. Only a few are allowed on campus, and the dashing Lieutenant Bayard makes free with the anti-Semitic remarks as he harasses one Jewish student. The prospect of women’s suffrage is unsettling and generally disapproved of, but the college administrators cannot come up with logical arguments against it. As for the new wave of immigrants at that time entering America from Southern Europe, they arouse all the Protestant mandarins’ latent anti-Catholic bigotry. In one scene Woodrow Wilson, slightly unhinged by his drugs and his paranoia, gives a semi-coherent public speech which turns into jokes about “darkies” and a rave against “the enemies of Protestantism” flooding into the country (pp.337-338).

So often as I read this novel, I found myself de-coding the Gothic bits to see how they played shorn of the supernatural. Take the melodramatic moment where Annabel Slade, escaped from the Demon King’s “Bog Kingdom”, dies in childbirth. Panicked rumours fly about that she has given birth to something monstrous – which would fit in with her having mated with a demon. But the rumours also echo the fear of whites having children with blacks. It occurred to me that the hysteria attendant upon Annabel’s childbirth was no more than what this inward-turning, snobbish, elite, self-satisfied white university community would express if one of its members gave birth to a black child.

And is the demonic “Bog Kingdom” code for mandarin fears of the demotic, uncouth working class?

Or, in another reading, is it code for the repression of healthy sexual urges?

As in much Gothic fiction, the extreme action, violence and hysteria have a distinct sexual edge. Princeton in 1906 is an all-male institution and something of a sexual hothouse. More than once, Oates implies that repressed sexual urges are one cause of the profound anxieties, neuroses and (possibly) hallucinations that her characters experience. We see this in her description (pp.228-229) of the young woman “Willy” (Wilhelmena) Burr, whose corseted body is unnaturally restrained in its striving to break with social custom. Quite late in the novel (pp.476-482), it is clear that while “The Unspeakable” may be a demonic curse, it also refers to homosexual activity among students, which finds an outlet in their rough “hazing” and casual violence. As for the virginal girls at the ladies’ seminary having hysterics at the sight of demon snakes – I think the Freudian imagery is pretty damned obvious.

In the midst of all this snobbery and sexual repression, there is one major character who seems at first a moral counter-balance to Princeton. This is the young Upton Sinclair, fresh from having produced his famous expose of the meat-packing industry The Jungle, and writing at a feverish pace in his denunciations of Capitalism and his hailing of the immanent Socialist dawn. Certainly he is depicted with more sympathy than most characters in this novel. Yet even Sinclair is blind to many of the things under his nose. Take this introduction to the conditions of his marriage:

“So devoted was Upton Sinclair to his work, he’d resolved never to spend less than twelve hours a day at his desk, with the unfortunate but necessary consequence that [his wife] Meta was obliged to milk the cow, that had come with the farmhouse; and deal with a flock of mangy chickens, that yielded very few eggs; and attempt to protect the meagre fruits of a small orchard and garden from armies of worms, insects, and slugs that infested them in overlapping shifts. Upton sympathised with Meta’s frustration, as with her exhaustion; but he did not condone her frequently voiced despair – if they were to one day help found a Socialist colony, it would be in a rural environment, and so the present farm work was excellent training.” (p.149)

Of course there is heavy irony here – the idealistic Socialist cannot recognise his own exploitation of his wife – and Joyce Carol Oates rewards Upton Sinclair by having him, too, suffer from hallucinations, in his case about his wife committing adultery. For all the laudable aspect of his moral outrage at society, Sinclair is still seen as a man of his age. He makes many pungent and accurate observations on the Princeton scene, but his naïve vision of the coming Socialist revolution is as ungrounded in reality as the mandarins’ racist fantasies. I was beginning to droop from this over-long, over-complex, over-clever congeries of Gothic and Historical when I was revived by the bravura chapter (pp.487-529) in which Upton Sinclair meets his young hero Jack London. Sinclair rapidly discovers that London’s “Socialism” is a thin mask for profoundly racist Nietszchean fantasies about Nordic supermen. [See the index at right for my take on London’s The People of the Abyss, one of the books which Upton Sinclair admires in this novel]. The sad truth appears to be that even those who wished to amend a corrupt and privileged society were not necessarily on the path to building something better.

There is one other theme that strikes me in The Accursed. Having presented a thoroughly unlikable university community, repressed, neurotic, racist and snobbish, Joyce Carol Oates implies that its salvation might come from its youth and from those people who consciously ignore its shibboleths. “Willy” (Wilhelmena) defies her family to pursue a modest but unladylike career. Josiah Slade, the brother of the abducted bride, at first sets out to get revenge on the man who abducted her, but is converted to a hunger for the real betterment of society. In this hopeful schema, the idiot boy Todd proves to be the salvation of the community when he lifts the curse by defeating the Demon King of the Bog Kingdom at a game of draughts. Very much in the American grain (think of innocent heroes like Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield), Oates comes close to seeing virtue only in callowness. And yet there is irony here too, for the novel’s innocents do not all end well. And from the perspective of one century later, we are aware that their social hopes did not all turn out as they expected.

I refrain from analysing the novel’s conclusion, where Oates glibly stands on its head much of the demonic imagery she has been deploying, and suggests that God may be at fault rather than the demons. Not only is it a profoundly unsatisfying wrap-up, but I’d be accused of offering “spoilers” if I went into too much detail.

After my ramblings about the contents of the book, it is time to front up with an opinion on it. Let me do this elliptically. Just last week, I was commenting on Stephanie Johnson’s novel The Writing Class, in which the creative writing tutor Gareth reflects bitterly:

“People write too much these days, on and on and on. You wanted to tell some of them to shut up. Look at Joyce Carol Oates with her fifty novels and God knows how many other works …” (p.226)

This is very much the reputation that the 75-year-old Joyce Carol Oates now has – the woman who has been cranking out at least a book a year since the early 1960s. Understandably, many of them have been highly praised, she is a respected part of the American literary establishment and she has for the best part of thirty years been teaching at Princeton, forsooth. But the very abundance of her work always gives reviewers an opening to tell her that she should slow down, write more carefully, concentrate on her craft and perhaps stop repeating herself. For the record, she had already written three or four Gothic novels before this one, and apparently she first drafted The Accursed in the 1980s when she had just joined the faculty at Princeton.

I salute and applaud Joyce Carol Oates’ wit and intellectual vigour. I do not wish to join the ranks of those who belittle her simply for having written so much. And yet I did wish that she had sculpted this outpouring more carefully. The Accursed has passages of great insight and acute historical judgement. Its Gothic sensationalism is fun up to a point. And yet it also wanders all over the compass, has too many characters and badly outstays its welcome. At 300 or even 400 pages, its wedding of demons and intellectuals could have been bracing. At 667 pages you do indeed want to tell the lady to shut up and you begin to wonder whether she has merely hit on a more up-market version of one of those tiresome mash-ups, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its ilk.

In the end, game-playing of this bulk and length is oppressive.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“BLACK DAHLIA & WHITE ROSE” by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco–Random House, $NZ36:99)

            I suppose basic questions we ask when we read a new collection of short stories include – What do these stories have in common? What are the writer’s preoccupations? What is typical of the writer’s style?

            This might sound a little like textbook questions as asked in an undergrad English tutorial. But asking them does at least save us from the chaotic possibility that each story is an entity complete in itself. And – goodness me! – how could we ever be able to write clever book reviews if we didn’t impose some sort of framework upon the books we are reading?

            Anyway, Joyce Carol Oates’ latest collection of stories, Black Dahlia & White Rose, helps the reader out a little by dividing its eleven stories into four sections.

            The first section consists solely of the title story.

            “Black Dahlia & White Rose” is Oates’ reconstruction of the notorious “Black Dahlia” case in Los Angeles in 1947, when the aspiring film actress and “model” Elizabeth Short was kidnapped, tortured and murdered, by a person or persons unknown, before her corpse was mutilated spectacularly and dumped in a waste-ground. The case was never solved – hence, like the Jack the Ripper murders, its continuing fascination for people with ghoulish minds. There’s the additional frisson that this real-life case played out on the fringes of Hollywood, where desperate people would do any degrading thing to break into what they thought was a glamorous career in movies.

            Oates’ version has the story narrated from the grave by the murder victim; by the murder victim’s room-mate Norma Jeane Baker (before she became “Marilyn Monroe”); and by the sleazy photographer who took soft-porn photos of both of them, and contemplated blackmailing a man who could have been the murderer. Technically, the story is a very proficient and accomplished piece of work, for all its depressing theme. It cuts between three quite distinctive voices. But, though it has been made this volume’s show-pony, it is hard to see what the story’s purpose is, except to re-visit the notorious case.

            The most convincing “voice” is that of the murder victim, who thinks she is street-wise and knows the score about men, but who of course gets way out of her depth in the end.

            Maybe that’s the point.

            Maybe Oates wants to signal that tough girls can very easily end up as damsels in distress.

            If this is Oates’ intended theme, then it meshes well with the five stories that are grouped together as the volume’s second section. In all of them, there are young people who think they have a handle on the world, but who are less in control than they think they are among adults. Or there are adults who exploit the weakness of children and young people.

            I regard “I.D.” as the very best story in the collection (fittingly, after first appearing in the New Yorker, it was anthologised in one of the annual volumes of Best American Short Stories). It’s narrated in the third-person-limited style from the viewpoint of the thirteen-year-old Lisette, who is ogled at high-school by older boys because they think she looks “hot”. Lisette’s solo mother moves between being a blackjack dealer and a “cocktail waitress” in Atlantic City. (Atmospheric references to Atlantic City’s boardwalk seem sad in a special way, now that the recent storms have demolished most of that tawdry tourist attraction). Through Lisette’s naïve, almost stream-of-consciousness babble, it is clear that her mother really earns her money in other ways. Left on her own, the thirteen-year-old seems sassy and sure of herself. Confronted in the most brutal possible way with the reality of her mother’s life (no, I give no spoilers here), she becomes a little child retreating into denial and fantasy. It is the convincing voice that is the story’s real asset.

            In “Deceit” we enter into the world of domestic abuse through the viewpoint of a single mother, hauled into a school counsellor’s office to answer questions about the bruises on her 14-year-old daughter’s body. The first half of the story is terrifying. At first the interrogation of the mother by the steely counsellor (unsubtly called Weedle) has us entirely on the side of the mother, who clearly and honestly has no knowledge of the violence done to her daughter. But our perceptions change as we find out more about what sort of mother she is. In a way, the denouement of this one is the sickest and most unsettling thing in the collection, even if no physical violence is done.

            “Run Kiss Daddy” is again a story of broken families. A divorced and remarried man (more unsubtlety in the fact that he is called Reno) ruminates on how much he wants his new marriage to work, with a wife who has two small children from her own previous marriage. No violence happens but a piece of over-the-top symbolism lets us know how very badly any reconstituted family could go wrong.       

            “Hey, Dad” is the curt monologue of son confronting the biological father who once cast him off in the most brutal and final way. “The Good Samaritan”, again in the first person, is a strange, unsettling story which, like “Run Kiss Daddy”, is left hanging in the air. The young woman who narrates it impulsively returns to its owner a wallet she finds on a train. She ends up having an encounter with somebody who may, or may not, have been involved in the most extreme form of domestic violence – but it is never made clear whether the violence actually took place.

            In none of these stories is Oates’ tone sardonic or condescending. She is not saying that all marriages and families are a sham; but she is saying that things can go badly wrong with families and marriages. She is also very wise to the new crop of lies told by people who think they are free spirits and are not limited by traditional conventions in marriage and child-raising. Too often , free spiritedness is code for not giving a stuff for other people and certainly not giving a stuff for real child-rearing. See “I.D.”, “Deceit” and “Hey, Dad” above.

            Moving away from real or potential domestic violence, this volume puts together in its third section three stories of quiet desperation.

            “A Brutal Murder in a Public Place” is simply the detailed description of a small bird flapping helplessly about inside a large anonymous modern airport lounge, banging against the plate glass window, and the narrator’s sense of shock and surprise at this living thing that has found its way in there in the first place. This, however, serves as prologue to two stories of women trapped and unfulfilled in otherwise placid and affluent marriages. In effect, Oates is deploying the old “bird in a gilded cage” imagery.

            In “Roma”, a childless middle-aged American couple are holidaying in Rome. They have been married for 30-plus years and are now in their 50s. It is not redundant to note that they are childless, because the story is really about how unfulfilled they are and the emptiness of their lives which they try to fill up in various ways – he with voyeurism including erotic art and peeping at neighbours (Hitchcock’s Rear Window is specifically referenced) and she with shopping. There is no violence in the story, but there is an awful domestic blankness. The wasteland of affluence without purpose.

            “Spotted Hyenas – A Romance”, the longest single story in the collection, is really a variation on the same theme. It also shows both Oates’ strengths and her weaknesses as a writer. A middle-aged childless woman has a boring rich corporation-lawyer husband. She remembers and begins to fantasize about her thwarted student career as a biologist studying animal life. She comes once again into contact with an old colleague from her student days, who now studies hyenas. This is the cue for detailed images of ferocious and instinctive animal life in contrast with the woman’s tepid, bloodless existence. Once again, childlessness is a signal for emotional sterility and pointless sex, which contrasts with the wild, functional, reproductive copulation of the hyenas. The trouble is, Oates overplays these images and goes on too damned long, so that they become overwrought and obvious.

            And in the final section, after the metaphorical prison of loveless, childless marriage, we are in literal prisons.

            “San Quentin” is a mere sketch – a monologue by a barely-literate prisoner taking a biology course in a prison night school and trying hard to understand what sort of animal he himself is. “Anniversary” goes to the other side of the teacher’s desk in a prison school. The essential theme is the discomfort of a well-educated volunteer woman instructor who comes to a men’s prison to teach a writing course. The sense of lock-down, of guards permanently watching, and of the outsiders’ wariness regarding all prisoners – these are all conveyed well. But Oates, having set all this up excellently, can’t forebear a tricky ending to round it off and give “Anniversary” the “closure” of a more traditional short story, when might have been better open-ended.

            So what do we have here? A collection of short stories which, in its four sections, moves from historical violence; to the threat or reality of domestic violence and child abuse; to the domestic sterility of affluent, childless marriage; to prison. Now why do I not feel more depressed after reading it?

            Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938) has been on the American literary scene for so long now that it’s easy to mistake her for part of the landscape and move on. Since the early 1960s, she has published an astonishing 50 novels. Black Dahlia & White Rose is her 25^th collection of short stories. These eleven stories were all originally published in magazines ranging from the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s to Ellery Queen and Playboy. Would it be fair to say that Joyce Carol Oates, who has won numerous literary awards and held many academic positions, represents what Middle America will read when it goes slightly highbrow?

            Possibly this is true, but it’s also demeaning to express it this way. The truth is that, despite some of their lapses, these are well-written stories which read well and have some point. The author is no fool. And I never feel depressed when I’m reading the work of somebody who knows her craft.