Review: 'Sourland' By Joyce Carol Oates
By Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco. Pp. 384. $25.99
Reviewed by Alan Cheuse, special to the Tribune
What’s obsession got to do with it, with the making of powerful and perhaps even lasting art? If you read Sourland, Joyce Carol Oates’ stunning new collection of short fiction, you have to answer: everything.
Fifteen new stories and the title novella make up nearly four hundred pages of obsessive focus on the plight of naïve young female adolescents and newly bereaved women in a world of pain, suffering, loss, and dangerous affections. The opening story, “Pumpkin-Head” is bizarre almost beyond belief, because a would-be suitor stops by to visit a new widow (husband only six months dead}, wearing a costume—a pumpkin head, “its leering cut-out eyes not lighted from within, like a jack-o’-lantern, but dark glassy” —and speaking to her “through the grinning slash-mouth in heavily accented English…” By the time the story ends, he has tried to force himself on her with a ferocious sort of Lawrenctian male energy, “his fingers forced up inside the soft flesh between her legs…”, leaving the reader in as much of a state of shock as the woman herself. Should she report an assault, she wonders. I wanted to. She fears that the man will return to haunt her. Certainly this paradigm—the woman floundering about in a world of male force—returns to haunt nearly every story in the book, producing an intensity that we haven’t felt in the American art story—and I’m serious about this although it might seem extravagant to say—since the work of Poe.
Violence, sexual boldness, and obsessive repetition, I repeat, mark nearly every page in this collection. In “The Beating”, for example, a high-school girl who visits her father in the hospital after he has received a terrible beating immediately after which she found him is abducted by one of her teachers who sexually assaults her. In “Probate”, a new widow goes to the state courthouse in Trenton, New Jersey to file her late husband’s will in probate court and ends in a surreal mash-up with the girl friend of a prisoner and the couple’s vicious infant. “Death Certificate” uses a court house again (this time a county court house in upstate New York) as its setting, as if to suggest that even such a rigid and ordered place as this may spring forth dramas of sexual ferocity and strangeness: a woman has come to purchase a facsimile of a death certificate, though whose we never learn, and runs in to a former lover, which brings to mind sexual memories of a masturbatory nature and tinged with horrific erotic violence as she recollects herself as “a woman screaming and tearing at a pillow cover with her teeth, moaning, sobbing…her desperate fingers inadequate trying to contain the muscular convulsions between her chafed legs, and there was a mad wish to pry up inside herself with, what?—a knife-blade, a pair of scissors…”
And if you still need convincing that this collection will resonate with the brave-hearted of both sexes, try the title story, in which (another) new widow flies to the upper Midwest for a tryst with a bizarre old acquaintance of her late husband and finds herself entangled in a situation resembling something out of a grade-C horror movie. The landscape in the story “Sourland” reflects in a rather blatantly romantic fashion the miseries of the bereaved woman’s interior state. As in the sky in which “clouds had turned heavy and sullen like a face suffused with blood” But even the urban landscape, such as the streets surrounding the Trenton courthouse in “Probate” offer a surreal portrait of a woman in a radical quandary about life as she gets lost “in a maze of one-way streets, detour signs and signs warning NO TURNS. Much of the corroded inner city…appeared to be under construction as in the aftermath of a geological cataclysm…” Making sense of life in a cataclysmic inner and outer landscape has been Joyce Carol Oates’ obsession for five decades. This evocative new collection shows just how much sense she can make of it now.
Alan Cheuse’s next novel, 'Song of Slaves in the Desert,' will be published next spring.
Find books by Joyce Carol Oates and other titles at the Chicago Tribune Amazon store.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.