She’ll happily devote five pages to what can only amount to a minute or two of a character’s experience (one reason her novels are rarely short) but in so doing will take you straight to the heart of a moment – or, as here, the agonisingly strung-out minutes of a sexual attack – without remorse. The result is nothing less than magical, a piece of work that is light yet dense, frenzied in its detail yet somehow also cool, measured and abstract. Is this why she seems to long for obliteration at the hands of a man’s “desire”?Īs ever, Oates’s prose – almost insolently alive, littered with italics and exclamation marks, switching apparently recklessly back and forth through place and time – would seem to break all the rules. And then there are the shadowy references to Hannah’s father, cigar-smoking “Joker Daddy”, who has left a trail of damage so great in his wake – the details unclear, yet all too guessable – that his daughter’s “deepest desire” is “to not be”. For if evil engenders evil – another perennial Oates theme – it doesn’t feel all that surprising to discover that much of this novel’s sadistic horror can be traced back to a certain paedophile priest at a Catholic home for boys. Race, class, child abuse – it’s all here. Nor is it a reveal to tell you that the grip and pace of this novel – for yes, it’s also a page-turner – relies on events ultimately connecting up in the most satisfying, albeit grim, way. And so explicitly and disturbingly narrated that it would actually verge on gratuitous to extract a quote here. This is a wild and panoramic piece of work, a pinpoint vision of a society with rottenness at its coreĪnd it’s no spoiler to say that the second attack is worse than the first. For the question that lurks at the heart of the novel – why, after such a brutal and terrifying sexual assault, does Hannah go back for more? – is an especially queasy one. But here, even by her own standards, she has taken a risk. That she is willing – no, determined – to go to the darkest, least politically acceptable edges of human emotion and behaviour isn’t so startling if you know her work. Joyce Carol Oates is, astoundingly, well into her ninth decade and this, perhaps even more astoundingly, is her 59th novel. To be able to write with such tearing astuteness about such fiercely contemporary issues – for it’s impossible to read this novel without thinking of #MeToo and, as the plot takes on an increasingly racist tone, #BlackLivesMatter too – would be a feat for any author of any age. Normally, I’d refrain from citing an author’s age, but here it merits disclosure. But when the child recovers and YK calls again with “instructions: place, date, time”, Hannah whimpers only the lightest of protestations before walking down yet another plush hotel corridor as numbly as a somnambulist. Rushing her to hospital, she blames herself for the “contagion” she’s inflicted on her family. When, that night, her young daughter becomes dangerously ill, she briefly comes to her senses, a mother again. A lover!” While the Filipino housekeeper makes smoothies for her children downstairs, she discards her soiled clothes and takes a shower, discovering that her breasts hurt “not unpleasurably”, reliving almost happily “that sinking sensation, the man’s desire, excluding her”. But more than that, though still traumatised, she is also elated: “I have a lover. There, on a street where the houses are “set apart from one another on three-acre lots”, keeping neighbours safely out of view, she still cannot risk her husband knowing where she’s been. To be able to write with such tearing astuteness about such fiercely contemporary issues would be a feat for any author of any ageĪs Hannah leaves the hotel – and there are plenty of indications that she may not make it out of there – and drives herself, bruised and bleeding and broken back to her home on prosperous Cradle Rock Road, you assume that she’ll go to the police. What follows is one of the most harrowing descriptions of a prolonged sexual assault that I can remember reading. She is immediately pulled inside and the door locked. In her gardenia-scented clothes and high heels, Hannah finally summons the courage to knock on the door marked “Do not disturb”. Someone who will make her feel cared for, unlike her patronisingly taciturn businessman husband who, since the Babysitter attacks, keeps a Magnum revolver in the bedside drawer. For lonely, bourgeois Hannah, who believes that “if a woman is not desired, a woman does not exist”, is searching less for sex (which is “repugnant” to her) than for a “soulmate”.
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