Joyce Carol Oates - I’ll Take You There

4th Estate 10.99

Readers of TransAtlantic fiction often feel uneasy. Critics love to tell us how much bigger, better and bolder American novelists are than British ones. Our small, delicate, class-obsessed fictions do not measure up to the vitamin-enriched super-prose of Bellow, DeLillo or Updike, the big swinging dicks of American fiction. Yet what exactly is the British reader supposed to get out of Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘I’ll Take You There’?

The novel (her 30th, not counting her 8 written pseudonymously, her 4 novellas, 8 poetry collections, 7 plays and 8 essays) is small, delicate and class-bound , and its narrator, a poor young student, is the reverse of vitamin-enriched, being drastically cerebral, idealistic, anorexic and lacking in confidence. ‘I’ll Take You There’ charts her progress towards greater self-determination in three sections, entitled The Penitent, The Negro-Lover and The Way Out, returning to the dying, working-class father who rejected her. In ‘The Penitent’, she is elected into the exclusive Kappa Gamma Pi sorority thanks to her willingness to help richer, stupider girls at Syracuse University. As dramatised by Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, this sorority is predictably destructive, but the details of life among young women will be recognised by anyone who has attended boarding school or a women’s college. To succeed in this world of confident, domineering femininity you must have D-cup breasts, a rich family, a willingness to “put out” and no Jewish blood. No wonder Sylvia Plath had her first breakdown in a similar institution. It is the Nazi dream made flesh in the New World of the early 1960s, and out of it Oates has fashioned a small masterpiece of black comedy.

The British housemother Mrs. Thayer is someone who embodies the exclusive, snobbish, repressive world that the narrator craves, but who is also opposed to its licentiousness. As a scholarship student our narrator (initially nameless, as so often in Oates’s fiction) yearns for her approval, can’t afford ordinary student life, but “like a diver who suspects that the water into which she wants to dive is freezing and lethal” yet is hypnotised by the ghastly Kappa world. Philosophy can’t save her, and neither can the low-paid jobs she, like so many modern students, takes on in the attempt to keep up. Oates’s description of her loveless childhood in Strykersville is overwritten but it is in describing the twin terror of poverty and snobbery, US style, that she shows her gift for amassing a charge of realistic detail in order to convey thought and emotion with electrifying force. American writers of Oates’s generation do have the edge, in that the conditions under which they grew up are closer to that of the Victorians. Where British novelist are still cushioned by the welfare state, Americans know what real poverty is like – and real wealth. The details stun and revolt: the frat party where some “wag” had put goldfish in the toilet bowls, the lies that she’s Episcopalian rather than Lutheran, the continual covering up for other Kappas, who discard used sanitary napkins under the sofa. Gradually she goes crazy, bringing about a Pyrrhic victory that cures her both of Kappas and Mrs. Thayer.

Next, Aniella (as she chooses to call herself) falls in love with a brilliant, contentious black philosophy student, the kind of love that is “a kind of illness; not a radiant idea as I’d imagined but a physical condition, like grief.” Predictably, there is no joy to come. Just as the narrator transgressed one social boundary in The Penitent, here she transgresses race. What emerges, painfully and touchingly, is the attempt not only of a young person to “cobble together a personality out of scraps” but an emergent author. Indeed, this novel feels unusually autobiographical, though it could be another deception, for the philosophers “Aniella” reads – Spinoza, Heidegger, Plato, Wittgenstein - are artfully woven into her character’s internal debate on freedom and responsibility. The last story, in which ‘Aniella’ confronts her dying father, is the weakest, but Oates even at her least good is more worthwhile than the big swinging dicks of American fiction. Hers is the still small voice of conscience filtered through genius that should be welcomed, whether it emerges here, or in her native land.

The Literary Review March 2003