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.

Commonplace Book

'...Once, he'd been younger and more hopeful and thus disappointed, wounded in his hope. To hope is to risk too much, like baring your throat to a stranger.'

from Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates (Part Three, Chapter 1)

Commonplace Book

'We were in a first-floor room at the far end of a two-storey stucco building of just discernible shabbiness and melancholy: something in the very jauntiness of the sign Days Inn Vacancies exuded this air of shabbiness and melancholy. In books there is said to be meaning, in our English class our teacher was reading poems by Robert Frost to us and it was astonishing to me, and a little scary, how the words of a poem have such meaning, but in actual life, in places like the Days Inn motel there is not much meaning, it is just something that is...'

from Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates (Chapter 24)

Dear Husband, by Joyce Carol Oates (2009)

Oates' output in short stories can be extremely variable in terms of quality. This is thankfully one of the good volumes. As will be familiar to any interested reader, her style is very firm, really quite surprisingly formal. This can sometimes weigh a little heavy in her novels. Her stories can be stunning when she gets it really right; the strength and wire of the formality makes the shorter form really punch. I'm glad to say that this happens several times in this volume. In her realist vein, the gritty Landfill catalogues a life almost as an amplification of yet-another-newspaper-statistic, most categorised by its death. The confusions and Ice Storm-like story of well-heeled eroticised family secrets in Cutty Sark marks the memory. Two tales of mothers, The Heart Sutra and Dear Husband,, detail desperation, loneliness, need and abandonment in the lives of women who put too much faith in their men, and the arms' length avoidance tactics of alpha males in situations in which they find themselves trapped. Both end horrifically. In one story in particular Oates goes for something different - and it's a pleasure to hear the alteration in that firm voice. The wry, sour-mouthed humour of Suicide by Fitness Center, put into the mouth of a fascinated, cynical and nervously vulnerable older woman is a joy. This one has a fault which two others also have: a slightly damp squib ending. Endings are always critical and a good amount of the time Oates "gets" their value. Not virtually perfect, as was her 2004 collection I Am No One You Know, but still a fine entry in the Oates canon.