FICTION
‘Lovely, Dark, Deep’
By Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco, $25.99, 432 pages
It’s easy to poke gentle fun of Joyce Carol Oates. Her legendary output has long been the stuff of punch lines. The same may be said for the stylistic quirks that mark her prose like fingerprints at a crime scene.
But beneath the good-humored joshing may lurk darker impulses. If Oates makes us giggle, it’s a nervous sort of laughter at best. Few other contemporary writers can so deftly lure the reader away from the comfortable realm of everyday disappointments into bone-chilling outbursts of unease and danger.
The 13 pieces in “Lovely, Dark, Deep,” her new collection, make a point of upsetting expectations. At first glance, the stories seem to be obsessed with clinical matters: heart attacks and C-Scans, eating disorders and aneurysms.
In “Sex With Camel,” she mocks the medical industrial complex with wit and precision. A teenage boy escorts his wise-cracking grandmother to a beguiling new hospital. When they’re directed to the “Medical Arts Pavilion,” the grandmother quips, “‘Pavilion?’ What’s that — like, a carnival or something?” The title of the story comes from a joke told by the grandson, an interjection of bawdy humor juxtaposed with the disquieting health issues at hand.
Oates shows a recurring interest in chemotherapy, a familiar plot device that perhaps plagues too much of modern realist fiction. Still, the author uses the architecture of medical and scholarly institutions to ground her characters in complex social predicaments, some as timeless as infidelity and family enmity, others so fresh they’re still steaming.
“The Hunter,” one of the collection’s most addictive entries, finds a poet entangled in a rushed affair with an older, married college president. All the while, she worries about her father’s slow deterioration in a hospice. The story unfolds with a methodical, sometimes dizzying intensity — then cracks open as the heroine is attacked and bitten on the face by a vagabond. The conclusion somehow manages to be even more startling.
Another explosion of violence occurs in “Mastiff” (which will also appear in “The Best American Short Stories 2014”). A new couple’s day hike turns terrifying when they encounter a bloodthirsty animal on the trail. The story is one of many involving lop-sided relationships and a sudden, forced reckoning with death.
“So risky, to love another person,” muses the ambivalent female protagonist in “‘Stephanos is Dead.’” “Like flaying your own, outermost skin. Exposed to the crude air and every kind of infection.”
While “Mastiff” and “The Hunter” spew the gory details of horror fiction, other stories are more subtly spooky. In “The Disappearing,” a woman suspects that her husband of 40 years is planning to leave. Her evidence: His bicycle and clothing have started vanishing from the house. “If marriage is a masquerade,” she notes, “there is the very real danger that masks may slip.” As tensions escalate, Oates weaves a confounding riddle that leaves readers guessing.
“The Jesters,” another unsettling meditation on the anxieties of getting older, arrives at an even more haunting conclusion. The couple here, also married 40 years, is settling into an uneasy retirement in a gated community. From their rear terrace, they can hear the distant sounds of neighbors whose house is obscured by trees. Reminiscent of John Cheever’s classic “The Enormous Radio,” they engage in the voyeuristic thrill of listening to unseen cookouts and croquet games — until more disturbing noises ensue. The story shifts into a mode more like Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” with peculiar time lapses and a jarring climax.
While the author’s storytelling prowess reaches its full force in “The Jesters,” “The Hunter” and elsewhere, the title story can feel more like a rhetorical exercise. Oates wrote the piece for Granta’s “Dead Interviews: Living Writers Meet Dead Icons,” imagining a tense encounter between an elderly Robert Frost and a deceptive younger woman. The depths of scholarship into Frost’s writing and biography are obvious, although the piece attracted controversy for its less than flattering portrayal of the revered poet.
Putting aside questions of the author’s agenda and ethical responsibilities, the story may shed light on the overall collection. “The poem is all about ‘mortality,’ you see,” says the 77-year-old Frost in one of his more generous moments. “The poem is the poet’s mainstay against death.” He also notes that great poetry always involves a “signatory” — “a word, a phrase, a break in rhythm … that is unexpected.”
These two ideas — the predominance of mortality and the urgency of keeping readers guessing — speak directly to what makes the collection so engrossing. Oates’ missives and attempts to rejigger recognizable plots are not uniformly successful, even if the workmanship is unassailable. Of the 13 stories in “Lovely, Dark, Deep,” some are darker and deeper than others — but the writing is always lovely.
