By Joyce Carol Oates
Plume Books, 323 pages
Available at National Book Store
Joyce Carol Oates is a furious writer, one who wields a scattershot/shotgun approach to whatever subject grips her fevered imagination. Whether it’s the dying thoughts of a woman trapped in a sinking car (the Mary Jo Kopechnee character in Black Water) or the epic reconstruction of Marilyn Monroe’s life in last year’s Blonde, Oates is one of America’s most daring and prolific writers.
And because she is so prolific, and fearless as a writer, you can easily forgive her lapses, her less successful forays, and just stand agape at her collected output: every year, it seems, a new novel as well as a new volume of short fiction emerges. How does she find the time to eat and sleep, we wonder? The Collector of Hearts, from 1999, contains 27 "New Tales of the Grotesque." The grotesque is a vein of fiction Oates seems to understand quite well (this is her second such collection). Throughout these tales, the spirits of Poe, Hawthorne, Bram Stoker and other Gothic writers arise, only updated and refracted through the peculiar prism of Oates’ modern-day concerns: victimhood and sexual oppression. Most of these stories have been previously published in literary and mystery magazines, so they’re chiseled down to the bone: full of raw emotions and fevered obsessions. Most of the tales deal with characters driven by paranoia, disturbed by past deeds, or overcome by guilt or terror:
Every morning no matter how freezing the fourth-floor bathroom of the residence, showering, shampooing her hair, vigorously, harshly. The body can’t distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.
Physicality torments these characters, especially as it relates to religion. The body is a thing of shame and revulsion, and while one could say Oates wears these obsessions too obviously, that she dwells on the Catholic and Puritan rituals of shame too repeatedly, this, apparently, is her dominant theme.
In bygone days, Hawthorne would have written about guilt, and pinned it on the character’s lack of insight into good and evil. Poe would have his narrator prattle on about the body hidden under the floorboards, as he does in "The Tell-Tale Heart," as a peek into a psychological state felt by only a courageous few. But this is the age of victimhood: most of Oates’ characters in The Collector of Hearts are victims of incest, rape, and other parental abuses. These are the modern horrors, and Oates gives us front-row seats to the present-day gallery of the grotesque. (It’s no accident that Oprah Winfrey recently picked Oates’ 1996 novel, We Were the Mulvaneys, for her Book Club; tales of victims, either children or women, are prominent in Oprah’s diet.)
Maternal relationships surface as the biggest culprit in these stories: mothers are either too controlling, too neurotic, too relenting, or just plain mentally deranged. Daughters suffer gravely as a consequence. I couldn’t help wondering about Oates’ relationship with her own mother as I read these tales, but why bother? A wellspring is a wellspring.
Violence is another concern, especially the violence which erupts in families. "I am a chronicler of the American experience," Oates explains in Book magazine. "We have been historically a nation prone to violence, and it would be unreal to ignore this fact. What intrigues me is the response to violence: its aftermath in the private lives of women and children in particular."
Though occasionally shrill or hysterical, Oates’ best tales here have a rare power to disturb, tapping into raw nerve endings and holding steady until the breathless final lines. She seems averse to restraint, or stopping mid-prose; every feeling and emotion is taken to its manic extreme, though each tale is presented with impeccable control. In a piece like "The Sky Blue Ball," for instance, Oates can make the most innocent of scenarios – a young girl tossing back a blue rubber ball over a concrete wall to an unseen playmate – bristle with tension and creepiness. Or she can conjure up a young girl’s hand-sewn hand-puppet ("The Hand-Puppet"), and make it truly terrifying to an older, suicide-driven woman. Recalling the eerie best of Shirley Jackson, or the pent-up fury of Sylvia Plath, Oates has an unmatched ability to externalize emotional states. She gives full flower to both unconscious fear and waking terror in these tales. It’s amazing that the woman never seems to run out of things to fuel her demons.