Cardiff, by the Sea by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates excels at writing stories of psychological suspense which also contain an underlying layer of more profound and unanswerable questions. In “Cardiff, by the Sea”, her new collection of four novellas, she presents several differently compelling and inventive strategies for teasing the reader into questioning what's real and what's only a part of the narrator's imagination. In the title story, an emotionally-charged terrifying childhood memory haunts a scholarly young woman. In “Miao Dao”, a stray cat becomes a kind of ghost guardian for a vulnerable teenage girl. A bright young student falls prey to her influential mentors in “Phantomwise:1972”. And, in “The Surviving Child”, a new wife joins a household haunted by the memory of a mother who tried to eviscerate her family. These are innately dramatic situations whose psychological complexity is furthered by the longer amount of space the author allows for them to be told, but the stories remain compact enough for their tension to remain breathtakingly persistent. Recent books of short stories by Oates such as “Pursuit” and “Night-Gaunts” present similarly suspenseful situations, but it's interesting how the author works in this new book with slightly longer forms of narrative to produce an effect that is very reminiscent of Henry James' “The Turn of the Screw.” 

Two of the funniest and most vivid characters in this collection are Elspeth and Morag who are the great-aunts of Clare, the protagonist of “Cardiff, by the Sea”. Clare travels to Maine after being informed that a grandmother she didn't know existed has left her a house in her will and the aunts take her into their home while the estate is being settled. The dialogue between the two aunts whips across the page as they relentlessly bicker and fuss over Clare who is caught helplessly between them. They're like an elderly female version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee from Lewis Carroll's “Through the Looking-Glass”. In fact, a more explicit reference to “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” comes in “Phantomwise:1972” where the student protagonist is named Alyce. She becomes the assistant and romantic interest/carer of Roland B___, a famous poet who remarks that he once met the original Alice who inspired Carroll. It's delightful to see how Carroll's writing continues to inspire and reconfigure itself within Oates' fiction.

I often remark how Oates' writing almost feels prescient given that her subjects frequently mirror the most topical debates occurring at the time of her book's publication. Here again, Oates' sensitivity for the questions dividing current politics inform her storylines. A pointed message is made in the novella “Phantomwise:1972” which, significantly, is set in the time immediately before the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision on Roe v. Wade. Given the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death and her proposed replacement, the topic of abortion has come to the forefront of American politics again. Of course, this is an issue Oates has written about numerous times before, most notably in her tremendous novel “A Book of American Martyrs”. But, in this new novella, Oates considers the point of view of a young woman who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant and encounters a crisis because she's not able to legally obtain an abortion. The story serves as a stark reminder at this crucial period of time that vulnerable young individuals will face innumerable challenges if these laws are overturned.

The opening of Oates' 2007 novel “The Gravedigger's Daughter” included a scene where a parent comes close to killing everyone in his family before committing suicide. This tragic circumstance occurs again but in very different contexts in two of the novellas in this collection “Cardiff, by the Sea” and “The Surviving Child”. In returning to the region of her birth family, Clare discovers her father might have executed her mother and siblings when she was very young but there's a compelling mystery throughout the story about whether this was in fact what happened. In “The Surviving Child” Elisabeth marries a widower whose first wife Nicola was a famous poet that is posthumously accused of killing herself and her daughter. The son Stefan narrowly survived this harrowing incident and continues to live with his father and new stepmother in the upmarket house where this tragedy occurred. Elisabeth's experiences living in this solemn estate are extremely eerie and tense in way that resembles Daphne du Maurier's “Rebecca”. It's fascinating how Oates reconfigures instances of filicide in her fiction to give very different slants and perspectives on this almost unspeakable crime to show the multitude of societal pressures and psychological derangements which might motivate them.

What brings all these gripping novellas to life is Oates' masterful use of description and pace to evoke visceral feelings of dread in the reader's imagination. In the large unsettling house Elisabeth inhabits it's remarked “Doorknobs feel uncomfortably warm when touched, like inner organs.” The squirming discomfort and unsettling atmosphere these metaphors and figurative language cause make these compulsive stories darkly pleasurable to read. Equally, Oates uses creepy imagery such as a spider web to invoke a mood but also to suggest deeper meaning. In the title novella it's asked “But why are you walking away? Is this not the intersection with another? Another life, whose web you have blundered into.” Here the recurring image prompts a feeling for how our lives are made up of innumerable paths and possibilities, but we are simultaneously trapped in our circumstances. In this way, Oates ingeniously builds stories which are both thrilling and prompt deeper questions about the mysteries of existence. 

You can also watch me interview Joyce Carol Oates about this collection here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGJlsLdSd28

Pursuit by Joyce Carol Oates

The best suspense novels always have a teasing ambiguity about whether you can trust the characters at the centre of their stories. Abby, the protagonist of Joyce Carol Oates’s most recent novel of suspense PURSUIT, can barely trust herself. At the start of the book she steps in front of a bus (whether on accident or on purpose is unclear) and is rushed to hospital with a concussion. Willem, who Abby only just married the day before, stays faithfully by her side and hopes to discover the reason why she has such persistently disturbing nightmares. Abby’s past is shrouded in secrecy as Willem has never met any of her family and eventually learns that her birth name was entirely different from the one she uses.

What follows is the tale of Abby’s self-invention born out of a violent upbringing and a broken home similar to that of Oates’ previous novel THE GRAVEDIGGER’S DAUGHTER, but here there is a gothic pallor to the atmosphere steeped in a consciousness so traumatized that Abby can scarcely separate fantasy from fact. There’s a teasing ambiguity to this story which entrances the reader with its swift momentum as well as its chillingly precise psychological and physical details. In trying to free herself from the catastrophic destruction of her parents’ marriage, Abby becomes tragically entombed within a fairy tale of her own creation.

There’s an attentive detail to the vulnerability of girls and mothers as well as the domineering and controlling nature of certain paranoid male personalities. Early on Abby acquired strategies to placate men: “As a girl you learn not to offend strangers by rebuffing them. Especially men. Strangers, but also employers.” This habitual silence is mirrored in the experience of Nicola, Abby’s mother, who learns that speaking out about abuse and threats does nothing to protect her or her daughter because there isn’t institutional support which can help her.

Yet Oates is also cognizant of the way violence is taught and bred into some men who enter the armed forces. Llewyn, Abby’s father, is a war veteran who is haunted by memories where “Maybe he’d shot (some of) the (Iraqi) enemy. So much confusion, he never knew… More than once it was kids they were shooting at, no more than thirteen years old. Moving targets. Just followed orders like everybody else, but even then sometimes he didn’t – not much.” Llewyn is someone trained to react violently against perceived enemies but he’s also prone to manipulating the story he tells himself to suit his own outcome.

The novel dramatically shows how these social teachings and repetitive ways of thinking can lead to calamity and psychological breakdown. In some of Oates’ recent fiction such as the novel HAZARDS OF TIME TRAVEL and the short story “Fractal” the author has exhibited dualities in her storylines. Entirely different narratives coexist and compete for the reader’s understanding of what is true. A similar strategy is taken in PURSUIT where the reader is hauntingly left to wonder whose reality we’re inhabiting. The world warps and the truth remains teasingly out of reach because the characters are so intent on reshaping their own stories. It’s chilling effective in its ability to disturb and leave the reader desperately searching for clues.

The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror by Joyce Carol Oates

In her introduction to the anthology American Gothic Tales (1996) which Joyce Carol Oates edited she pays tributes to the gothic tradition in American literature bourn out of a crisis in the Puritan consciousness. She detailed how writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and H.P. Lovecraft wrote unsettling fiction in which “the ‘supernatural’ and the malevolent ‘unconscious’ have fused” and how Lovecraft, in particular, has a compulsion in his fiction “to approach the horror that is a lurid twin of one’s self, or that very self seen in an unsuspected mirror.” Such a crisis in consciousness where the real and unreal intermingle to produce horrific results is adeptly-realized in the six unsettling and mesmerizing tales contained in Oates’ new book The Doll Master and Other Tales of Terror.

Reading about characters such as a lonely boy whose sister died of a rare disease, a diligent adolescent girl entrusted with house-sitting a beloved teacher’s upscale residence or a wife who ardently desires to be a loving companion to her charismatic husband, we want to believe and trust these sympathetic individuals. Even when taken into the point of view of a white man imprisoned for shooting dead an unarmed black boy, we guardedly hope that there has simply been a misunderstanding as he so vehemently insists. We do this in order to preserve our belief in people’s essential “innocence” and “goodness”. We’re invited in these stories to connect with these characters’ experiences - sometimes in a bracingly direct manner such as this passage in the title story: “All your life, you yearn to return to what has been. You yearn to return to those you have lost. You will do terrible things to return, which no one else can understand.” The involved reader will hesitantly survey his own emotionally conflicted experience as well as fearfully wondering what lengths the cryptic narrator has gone to assuage his own painful feelings about his past. Here is the perverse pleasure of these stories which become so personally involving it’s as if we see the horrific consequences created from our own darkest compulsions (albeit within the “safe” realm of fiction).

Oates has a masterful way of leading us through the consciousness of the troubled individuals at the centre of these stories so that heartfelt sympathy is gradually replaced by guarded unease and, eventually, by a terrifying repulsion. Paranoia leads the characters to conclusions which make them act in a way to justify reprehensible actions. Their fear often comes from social issues such as drug abuse, economic inequality, racial divisions or child kidnapping. The narrator of the story ‘Soldier’ remarks how “Uncle T. has told me This country is at war. But it is not a war that is declared and so we can't protect ourselves against our enemies.” Destructive divisions are created by ideological notions passed down by political rhetoric, extreme religious institutions or inflammatory media sources to create an “us” and “them” mentality where the characters feel drawn into taking extreme action to defend against insidious encroaching forces. At other times, paranoia arises in a more domestic setting from problems that seem sadly endemic of the human condition like a fear that those we love will eventually betray us.

Many stories contain surprising and satisfying twists worthy of the most compulsively-readable tales of Poe or Agatha Christie. Unexpectedly the hunter might become the hunted. Those who seemed well-meaning or benign become frightfully sinister. What felt like sure fact turns out to be fiction formed in a character’s deluded mind. Oates finds inventive methods for keeping the reader on their toes. She invokes the methods of this genre’s great masters while building upon them with issues current to today. “Mystery, Inc” pays the most playful tribute to the suspense genre as it is set in a rural bookstore which contains enticing treasured editions from some of America’s greatest writers. It also allows Oates to engage with a meditation upon the genre itself as a touchstone for our most personal philosophical concerns. The shop’s gregarious owner states that “It is out of the profound mystery of life that ‘mystery books’ arise. And, in turn, ‘mystery books’ allow us to see the mystery of life more clearly, from perspectives not our own.”

"the lonely Siamese cat appeared in the kitchen doorway staring at me with icy blue eyes" from 'Gun Accident: An Investigation'

Another story 'Big Momma' has the tenderly emotional and creeping sinister feel of a fairy tale. An insecure middle school student named Violet who has recently moved with her working single mother to a new area ingratiates herself with a welcoming close-knit family run by a single father. She’s rebellious against her mother and seduced by the caring affection of her friend’s father. Although she becomes naturally wary of something unsettling about her new adopted family, she is seduced by the acceptance she finds with them which feeds her emotionally and physically. The startling outcome and imagery invoked by this parable of young adulthood produces a distinctly haunting feeling.

Oates has previously invoked elements of genre fiction in multiple novels and story collections. These range from novels of ambitious literary scope such as her gothic quintet of books which she first began publishing in the early 80s with the family saga Bellefleur (1980) and only recently completed with the historical gothic-horror novel The Accursed (2013). Some story collections approach genre in a more straightforward manner such as her books Haunted (1994) and The Collector of Hearts (1998) which indulge in sinister stories of the “Grotesque”. Last year she produced Jack of Spades: A Tale of Suspense (2015) which takes the form of a thrilling story about author-rivalry and pseudonyms. With The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Oates has created unique, gripping stories which take us to the most extreme edges of what people are capable of when logic breaks down and their minds are plagued by virulent emotions. The terror comes from knowing that with a twist of fate their stories could become our own.

This review also appeared on Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies