In an era that fetishizes form, Oates has become America’s preëminent fiction writer by doing everything you’re not supposed to do.
In Joyce Carol Oates’s novel “Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart” (1990), Jinx Fairchild, a star high-school athlete, is assigned a five-hundred-word paper on the topic “I Believe.” To his surprise, Jinx finds himself endlessly tweaking the essay—“in a ferocity of concentration,” Oates tells us, “as singleminded as his concentration on basketball.” The aim of this “exhausting” process is not to sharpen his syntax or to clarify his thinking but to present the truth as he perceives it and to demonstrate his newfound sense that “words on paper” can be “expressions of the soul.”
It’s hardly a stretch to see an allegory here for his creator’s own methods—his approach to composing a credo emerging as a credo in itself. As far back as the novels in Oates’s Wonderland Quartet, such as “Expensive People” (1968) and “them” (1969), which received the National Book Award fifty years ago this fall, Oates has deployed her zeal for revision to forge a style of rousing roughness. Her dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them set in western New York, forgo an air of cool mastery in favor of a kind of cultivated vulnerability, an openness to engulfment. Human existence, in her handling, seems a primarily somatic enterprise, and her greedily adjectival prose can sometimes read like a sort of dramatized phenomenology. Even on a bustling city street, her characters can come across as frontierspeople, or toilers on a polar expedition. As she invokes a world of pounding hearts and thumping ears and watering mouths, she exhibits a refreshing freedom from embarrassment, an indifference to the concept of overkill.
Oates’s friend the novelist John Gardner once suggested that she try writing a story “in which things go well, for a change.” That hasn’t happened yet. Her latest book, the enormous and frequently brilliant “Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.” (Ecco)—the forty-ninth novel she has published, if you exclude the ones she has written under pseudonyms—is a characteristic work. It begins with an act of police brutality, and proceeds to document the multifarious consequences for the victim’s wife and children: alcoholism, low-level criminality, marital breakdown, incipient nervous collapse. In a 1977 journal entry, Oates acknowledged that her work turns instinctively toward what she called “the central, centralizing act of violence that seems to symbolize something beyond itself.” Perhaps the most heavily ironic statement in her œuvre comes in her second novel, “A Garden of Earthly Delights” (1967), when a woman says, “Nobody killed nobody, this is the United States,” while the most characteristic piece of exposition may be found in “Little Bird of Heaven” (2009): “Daddy was bringing me home on that November evening not long before his death-by-firing-squad to a house from which he’d been banished by my mother.” Among contemporary American fiction writers—and, since the deaths of Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, she possesses a strong claim to preëminence—Oates most clearly displays what Henry James called “the imagination of disaster,” a faculty or frailty she often gives to her creations. (“Sometimes she thought idly about earthquakes, fires, buildings cracking in two,” we read in “them.” “She thought of fires, of bulldozers leveling trees and buildings.”)
But where James wanted to tame his sense that life was ferocious and sinister, contingent and multiple, Oates taps her feeling of inner chaos as a creative resource. James said that the artist’s eternal problem was how to create a geometric pattern that disguises the fact that “relations stop nowhere”; Oates has talked of the elastic and the fluid. In 1968, she voiced a desire to publish “a long work with many characters, many events, a jagged and unclean plot, closely tied in with ‘reality’ ”—a formulation that would have kept James awake for months—and, whatever the charges that have been levelled at Oates’s work, she cannot be accused of failing to realize this ambition.
In books as disparate as her first novel, the star-crossed romance “With Shuddering Fall” (1964), the celebrated urban epics “them” and “Wonderland” (1971), the unfairly derided mystic-politico-psychosexual thriller “The Assassins” (1975), the academic chamber piece “Marya: A Life” (1986), the Eisenhower-era chronicle “You Must Remember This” (1987), the Marilyn Monroe bio-fiction “Blonde” (2000), and the post-9/11 small-town mystery “Carthage” (2014), characters insist that experience is a mess of shards and shreds. Jessalyn McClaren, in “Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.,” reflects that the mental mode she calls “widow-think,” far from helping her to navigate changed circumstances, is nothing more than “a barely controlled panic of neurons crazily firing.”
Even in a receptive climate, such an aesthetic would surely prove divisive, and the conditions have often been harsh. If Jinx Fairchild, straining to express his soul, is a stand-in for Oatesian principles, then Mrs. Dunphy, the senior-year English teacher, could be said to embody official literary standards. (The scene takes place in 1957.) She gives Jinx a D-plus and insists that he was lucky not to receive an F. “You know the rule,” she says. “No run-on sentences.” When Jinx resubmits his assignment, he receives a B-plus and the message is clear—in playing it safe, he is denying himself the opportunity to achieve something transcendent. Oates’s portrayal of killjoy politesse might be seen as a nose thumbed at grudging book reviewers, but her attitude toward Mrs. Dunphy’s strictures has deeper roots.
Ahigh-achieving product of nineteen-fifties academe—she was the valedictorian of her graduating class at Syracuse University, in 1960—Oates rejected what she saw as the prevailing pieties of literary conduct: “symmetry, unity of tone, precision.” In a study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry—one of a series of strikingly ambitious literary essays she has published—she took aim at the rationalist agenda promoted by the eminent critic R. P. Blackmur, who had led the Henry James revival in 1934, with an edition of James’s prefaces (“The Art of the Novel”). In an essay on Dostoyevsky’s “The Possessed,” Oates lamented that critics with a “Jamesian sensibility . . . simply cannot see” the structure of longer novels, and argued that the loose baggy monster—in James’s notorious phrase—“is loose and baggy and monstrous only to the critic who confuses his own relative short-sightedness with an aesthetic principle.”
Oates wasn’t alone in this crusade—at least, not at first. In 1949, when she was a schoolgirl in Niagara County, the Nobel Prize was awarded to William Faulkner, a writer who was steeped in the work of Dostoyevsky and dismissed James as a “prig.” Many of the best-known novelists who emerged during those years—Lessing, Bellow, Mailer, Styron—had paid tribute to the Russian model. In criticism, too, escape routes from the formalist cul-de-sac were taken up in, notably, Iris Murdoch’s polemics “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” (1959) and “Against Dryness” (1961), and in Frank Kermode’s “The Sense of an Ending” (1967), a study of “the dilemma of fiction and reality” that considers the devices used by “The Idiot.” And Blackmur himself had a change of heart, embracing a radical new position that yielded essays such as “The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry James” (1951) and a study of the European novel that dwells on the work of Dostoyevsky, presented as explicitly superior to the products of “form.”
What distinguishes Oates’s record is not just longevity but doggedness. For a while, she had a kindred spirit in Iris Murdoch, who, around 1970, started writing novels in a mode that Oates called “self-consciously ‘Russian,’ ” being “looser, freer, more ribald,” notable for a “breathless, plunging, unedited” voice and “unresolved, troubling, provocative endings.” By contrast, Bellow’s books became shorter and tidier, and, anyway, for all the creative ebullience—the “waterfalls of self-displaying energy”—exhibited in a novel like “Humboldt’s Gift,” his had always been, in Oates’s view, an art of “accommodation, not terror.” And Oates’s contemporary Anne Tyler, a onetime grad student in Slavic studies whose early books “resembled the meandering of streams,” had been seduced by the charms of conventional structure. Oates, all the while, favored the flood over the levee, while striving to curb the mysticism and the slaloming plotlines of the books she published in the years after completing the Wonderland Quartet. Exorbitant attacks appeared (one by James Wolcott, in Harper’s, was titled “Stop Me Before I Write Again”). But despite her view that J. D. Salinger’s “dignified withdrawal into silence is understandable,” given the “jeering and dismissive” critical response to his last published work, silence was never likely to be her path.
Like Philip Roth, who followed a late-sixties sensation (“Portnoy’s Complaint”) with a series of near-misses and outright duds and then regrouped, Oates produced an amazing run of books, starting in the mid-nineteen-eighties, with a similar emphasis on history and autobiography, which has continued today, notably “Marya,” “Because It Is Bitter,” “Black Water” (1992), “What I Lived For” (1994), “Zombie” (1995), “Blonde,” “Missing Mom” (2005), “The Gravedigger’s Daughter” (2007), “Carthage,” and “A Book of American Martyrs” (2017). She has received a shelf’s worth of lifetime-achievement awards—including, in May, the Institut de France’s two-hundred-thousand-euro Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca. If this feat of rallying and renewal has not attained the same legendary status as the achievement known as “late Roth,” it is partly because Roth found a palatable compromise—coursing fluency repurposed as oratorical clarity—while Oates refused to adapt her vision of how a novel should behave. Just as Jules, in “them,” aspires “to break free of the morass of the flesh” and become “pure spirit,” so Oates has wanted to do away with customary modes of reference and description, to be free to write in a way “quite unredeemed by poetic grace,” in a phrase from her study of D. H. Lawrence. (She described the language in one of her novels as “deliberately clumsy at times.”) She has wanted to be able to leave behind, when it suits her purposes, the embankments of orderly syntax and plot. That her counter-aesthetic represents a set of convictions, and not any deficiencies of technique, was made plain, in 1996, by the publication of “We Were the Mulvaneys,” which appeared on the Times best-seller list and was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. It’s a classically accomplished piece of work, with resemblances to Roth’s “American Pastoral.”
Oates’s latest novel begins more or less where “We Were the Mulvaneys” more or less ended, in an intensive-care unit, with the death of a patriarch. The opening scene takes place on an afternoon in the fall of 2010, when Whitey McClaren, a sixty-seven-year-old businessman and onetime mayor of Hammond, New York, pulls off the highway near his home town, just beyond a “grimy and graffiti-defaced” overpass, to approach a pair of patrol cops in the process of attacking a “dark-skinned young man,” and is beaten up and then tased. (“Trying to rise. Oh but his heart is pounding—hard.”) From this briskly brutal scene, Oates spins a seven-hundred-and-eighty-page portrait of rumination, recrimination, and renewal. “Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.”—the title comes from Whitman—is a novel of aftermath, an epilogue drawn to epic length, the story of what happens to a group of people robbed of their “lynchpin” or “anchor.” (Oates employed a similar narrative strategy in “Assassins” and in her 2001 novel “Middle Age: A Romance.”)
“We Were the Mulvaneys” was rare among Oates’s books in using a single first-person narrator. The new novel is written in her favored roaming third person, and is told from more than half a dozen perspectives. There are two McClaren sons: Thom, in his late thirties, the second-in-command at McClaren, Inc.—a commercial printer that long ago diversified—and the runt of the litter, Virgil, a thirty-one-year-old artist and dropout. There are three daughters, Beverly (prom queen turned bored housewife), Lorene (local high-school principal), and Sophia (a pharmaceutical-lab assistant), as well as Jessalyn, their beloved “mommy.” Whitey’s death sends the remaining McClarens into various crises—prompting Sophia, for example, to reëxamine everything she previously knew, from familiar roads to professional habits. (She no longer feels comfortable killing animals for lab tests.)
Family life is a suitable subject for a novelist with Oates’s emphases. As well as serving as a mirror of mores, a site for drama and violence (“a battleground,” in the words of one character), it is also an occasion for sensory description, challenging the writer to convey what the psychoanalyst R. D. Laing called “the texture, the taste one might say,” of familial experience. The family unit is also a breeding ground for myth. “You may have thought our family was larger,” Judd Mulvaney recalls; in the new novel, it isn’t long before we discover that there’s more to Whitey McClaren than his “good-natured and approachable” persona.
And so the family theme mobilizes Oates’s essential skepticism. Although she has written frequently about social injustices—“them” culminates in the 1967 Detroit riot—she is not so much a realist as an impressionist, with a gift for a poetic and idiosyncratic kind of group portraiture. “Impossible to characterize our family’s experience,” a man reflects in the early pages of her best-selling gothic saga “Bellefleur” (1980): “Are we beset by tragedy, or merely farce?—or melodrama?—or pranks of fate, sheer happenstance, that cannot be deciphered?” There is no answer, and no higher force to whom we might appeal for judgment. As the narrator of her Princeton-set horror novel, “The Accursed,” warns, in an author’s note, “There may be multiple, and competing, histories; as there are multiple, and competing, eyewitness accounts.” Or, in Judd’s words, “What is a family, after all, except memories?” To Oates, the reality of family life is social reality in excelsis, and perhaps the ultimate subject for a novel. (Many of Oates’s favorite works in the form—“The Brothers Karamazov,” “Women in Love,” “The Sound and the Fury”—tussle with saga conventions.)
The pinballing point of view of Oates’s novel unsettles any fixed concept of the local institution known as “the McClarens.” When we read about “the wonder of an older brother to a younger,” this is just one of a vast number of permutations. Elsewhere, we are shown the burden represented by a younger brother to an older, and the “innocently-sisterly” way in which the housewife Beverly can be rude to the slightly younger high-school principal Lorene; when Beverly is using her “good-daughter” voice on the phone to Jessalyn, it’s “bright-glittering like bubbles on a stream beneath which, if you looked closely, you’d see sharp-edged rocks and rubble.” The novel has been constructed to maximize flexibility. Among its fifty-two chapters is a brief composite picture entitled “Recurring Dreams of the McClaren Children.” An isolated vignette—“The Widow’s Orgy”—shows Jessalyn giddily emptying Whitey’s expensive liquor bottles into the kitchen sink. (“Oh, Mom. What on earth have you done.”) And toward the end, in another vignette, we are reminded that Beverly, the daughter lost in grief, is a mother, too:
If Dostoyevsky was a specialist in the “dialogical,” Oates serves up something altogether more churning and (to borrow a term of praise, from a 1977 journal entry) “agonizingly thorough.” For a while, the novel seems to be concerned with Thom’s attempt to achieve legal justice for Whitey’s death, and with his attempts to frighten off Jessalyn’s new boyfriend, Hugo Martinez, a Newark-born photographer and poet whom some of the McClaren children view as a gold-digger. (“How would Mom ever meet a Cuban?” Lorene wonders.) Yet neither of Thom’s projects comes to dominate our interest. And the novel is so teeming with nuances and details and inklings that you barely have time to register the irony that Whitey died in the course of defending a victim of racial profiling, despite having been soft on police violence during his time as Hammond’s mayor—or that Thom’s two causes are inherently at odds, one pertaining to the fallout of a racially charged assault, the other incipiently racist.
At times, there’s little to hold on to. But then, why should the reader be afforded the feeling of terra firma so persistently denied to the characters? As soon as Jessalyn has started enjoying the memory of the stone house at 99 Old Farm Road, filled with her five children and their five sets of friends, she corrects herself: “Well, that wasn’t accurate perhaps. By the time Virgil was old enough to bring friends home, Thom was too old to wish to bring his friends home; not to mention those girlfriends of Thom’s he hadn’t dared bring home.” When she reflects that “a widow’s life” is “a posthumous life; a left-over life, you could say,” she realizes that putting such a melancholy truth into words makes it “sound exalted and profound somehow,” when in fact the widow’s condition was “a diminishment, like a wizened pea or a crumpled napkin.” But even to say that is “to hope to inflate the diminishment, and in this hope there was folly.” Cliché after cliché is tested and then dispatched, along with any sense of consolation.
Oates’s habits are designed to unsettle us and, though pleasure is never out of the equation, the novel avoids many traditional narrative strategies for ginning up tension. The reader is shown, long before any of the surviving characters are, the circumstances of the novel’s central narrative event. Whitey’s roadside encounter with the Hammond police is presented as answers to a series of factual questions (Why did he pull over? Where had he been driving from?). And a character can be introduced with the syntactic equivalent of a four-car pileup:
(The brackets are hers.) Now and again, you’re reminded of Martin Amis’s grievance that, though James Joyce could take you anywhere, he keeps taking you places you don’t want to go.
And yet there is great joy to be derived from the novel’s submerged patterns, its mind-boggling fecundity, its gallimaufry of devices (stream of consciousness, analytic omniscience, sentences both snaking and staccato), its combination of intricacy and lucidity. An early chapter called “The Seed” moves from the McClaren children waking up in the family home, via some reflections on sibling order, to an unsituated flashback of Virgil explaining that he wants to drift like a cottonwood seed, and his father telling him that a seed is supposed to take root and grow. The evocation of an extended period (“In his twenties he’d disappeared for weeks, months at a time”) then settles into a dramatic scene, a debate between Virgil and Whitey on the concept of “use”; Whitey thinks that “we are here on earth to be of use,” while Virgil wants to know “what kind of use, for whose use, at what price to the user.” The debate, in which Jessalyn “intervened, gently,” is seen from various perspectives: Sophia, usually Virgil’s ally, hopes this time that their father will rebuke him; “the McClaren siblings” collectively notice that Virgil never seems hurt by Whitey’s remarks; Virgil thinks, “This was unfair! And inaccurate!”; and Whitey feels frustrated that he cannot defeat his own son in argument, while regretting that he had agreed to give him that eccentric name. (“Not likely . . . that he’d have such frustrating experiences with a son named Matthew.”) The rest of the chapter canters through Virgil’s past: loving poetry and painting as a “dreamy child”; enrolling at Oberlin College, and then leaving; accepting a teaching job in North Hammond, and then resigning; struggling to articulate his philosophy of “extreme altruism”; and slipping into codependency with Jessalyn (“You are ‘enabling’ our son,” Whitey tells her, using a piece of newly acquired jargon). Then we slip back into the family’s bedside vigil.
Although Oates rejects cohesion as a formal virtue, she has a coherent vision of what literature can deliver. She believes in the itching and the ornery and the oddly shaped, and has been trying to produce fiction that feels as irreducible to simple meanings, as resistant to paraphrase, as the subject matter it portrays. The heroic figures in “Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.” are Jessalyn and Hugo Martinez and, perhaps above all, Virgil. The other McClaren siblings represent a bullying orthodoxy, like the “tradition-oriented critics” of the fifties.
“He doesn’t care at all that Daddy is seriously ill,” an unnamed McClaren says of Virgil, while Beverly claims that some part of Virgil’s brain is missing—“the part that is sensitive to social cues.” The four-page scene that follows, beginning “Hi, Dad,” makes it clear that Virgil cares as much as anybody. At one point, he takes a deep breath, lifts a handmade woodwind instrument to his mouth, and produces, Oates tells us, a series of earnest, breathy notes “so airy, you couldn’t define them as flute-sounds.” ♦
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