Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates (2009)

The power and compulsion of this novel are undeniable, I think. Its subject matter is 'standard Oates' - that is, the dark underside of everyday America. Not in a louche or particularly sexy way, but in a grimy or ordinary way. The best likening would be to talk about the difference between the colour of fresh grass in the countryside, and the colour of the grass in that rarely-touched area at the middle of a big motorway junction. Essentially it's the same micro-landscape, but at the motorway junction there's an unmistakable greyness, an ashy quality has been introduced. One imagines the soil a lot more burdened and yet leached. It's that post-industrial, commuter-era, grey, compromised world that Oates delineates, compulsively. This one is about a murder in 1983, and the consequences that echo down through the ensuing twenty years. The first part is seen through the eyes of Krista Diehl, a young teenage girl whose father is suspected of the murder of his lover, Zoe Kruller. It moves through the horrors and the bewilderment of the family explosion, and all the ripples which circle out through a small New York state city on the Black River. The second part is seen through the eyes of Zoe's son, Aaron, who found her murdered body, and who copes with an already dysfunctional family imploding still further. Their parents' lives are typical of their times, and Krista and Aaron are exemplars of their era also. The lameness emotionally, the disconnects and profoundly compromised coping strategies, the psychological burden are all realised with convincing ordinariness, against the sooty and snowy backdrop of a dreary long-past-its-best town. I think that one of the major achievements of Oates in this book, and those like it in her catalogue, is in the matter of proportion. She manages to so direct her material that the unmissable impression is that it could have happened in quite this way, that there is something in the feel of the story and her commitment to it which lend it an almost symbolic uber-truth. The structure of the picture left in the mind is compelling. Her awareness of this is perhaps on a not quite conscious (or perhaps it's a super-conscious?) level, and has the odd 'purity' of such things. She's known for her notion of 'channelling' a story, which makes all the more strange the fact that there's one area where her subconscious power doesn't rip through to its target. Speech is that area. Too many times her characters sound a little similar to one another. Certain words are used by slangy characters that only the uptight ones would utter. It's like her own inner voice somehow wins out over those her characters ought to have. However, it's a tribute to her that this failing comes across ultimately as minor, eclipsed by the extraordinary power of her visionary ordinariness.