SOURCE: McPhillips, Robert. “The Novellas of Joyce Carol Oates.” In Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction, edited by Greg Johnson, pp. 194-201. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.

The most successful of Oates's early novellas is the first. Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976) focuses on the life of a man, the “maniac” Bobbie Gotteson, born not to privilege but to squalor. Indeed, in the gruesomely ironic first chapter, the infant Bobbie, in a parody of Christ's birth, is found in a locker, “held up to the lights and declared Still alive in the Trailways Bus Terminal on Canal Street, New York City, New York, as good a place as any.”¹ Such a mechanical “birth,” coupled with the chapter's title, “Nativity,” suggests that Oates is operating on an allegorical as well as a realistic level in the narrative. In twenty brief chapters whose rhythm is staccato, Oates has spliced together the monologue of Bobbie, addressed to a judge and jury (which, by extension, the reader becomes), on trial as a serial murderer; the monologue nonetheless shifts voice and perspective, reflecting Bobbie's schizophrenic personality. The novella illustrates the split between the inner, true Bobbie Gotteson, and the external, false Bobbie, this “child” born of the heartlessly rural United States of mid-century—“Time: 6:05 PM. Date: February 13, 1944” (Triumph [Triumph of the Spider Monkey], 11)—raised in foster homes and institutions in the bleak gray landscape of Newark and industrial northern New Jersey, and forced to become so false by his environment, the entire American continent from New Jersey to California.

This split is presented as one between soul and body, as dramatized in Gotteson's explanation of “Why I Hacked Nine Women to Death”: “The ‘hacking’ was only physical and incidental. Don't ask me about the ‘hacking’!—my body took over, and when bodies take over the spirit sails over the horizon. … The various messes of the human body, though natural enough, have always caused me to cringe and reach for my guitar, in order to transcend physical distress. Atop a rumpled stained bed I have been known to compose an original ballad, flicking my hair out of my eyes and strumming wildly in order to transcend the field of battle. Bobbie, you are so beautiful! some of them cried” (Triumph, 54-55).

Bobbie typifies, in many ways, the Oatesian character “locked in the flesh” (them, 34), who would transcend his or her physical self through art—the “spider monkey” body who would be pure spirit through his music and guitar and later become a successful musician with a desire “to be a face on a billboard!—was that too much to ask?” (Triumph, 75). This is a peculiarly American dream.

But, like so many characters in Oates, Bobbie never achieves either transcendence or a stable ego. Throughout the book, he is likened to various animals besides a spider monkey—a “little ape” (33), a “scavenger bird” (61), a “scorpion” (75), or simply a “beast” (49). Bobbie remains both childlike and, as the spelling of his name indicates, feminized throughout the narrative, in search of love from such inadequate maternal and paternal figures as Melva, an aging Hollywood actress; Vlad J., a Polanski-like director who promises him a screen test; and Melva's erstwhile husband, Mr. V., a Howard Hughes-like movie producer, a spectral figure who heads the mysterious Vanbrugh Corporation. And yet, despite his frequent role as a gigolo, Bobbie has a pathological hatred of women which he claims to have derived from his “Old Man,” a lover from prison, another inadequate father figure, “Danny Minx, also known as Danny Blecher.” Danny “warned ‘Bobbie,’ he whispered in my ear in his meaty hot breath—warning, just a little friendly warning, ‘If you even think about them, Baby Bobbie, I'll cut off your balls. How's that?’” (Triumph, 34).

Symbolically emasculated by his environment, denied transcendence through sex or music or film, all of which the Vanbrugh seemed to promise him, Bobbie lets his frustrations erupt into a series of violent murders of women—“hack[ing]” them “free of being Female” (Triumph, 76), as he chillingly puts it. That Oates is able to elicit a form of empathy for this murderer so pitifully “trapped in his body, sobbing long ugly Melva-hoarse sobs because he is Gotteson the Spider Monkey and nobody else is Gotteson and Gotteson cannot get born into being anyone else, Gotteson is Gotteson is Gotteson forever” (Triumph, 89)—this from the novel's ironically titled final chapter, “The Redemption of the Maniac Gotteson”—is a measure of her uncanny ability to fathom the depths of the most grotesque of characters. It is an accomplishment she will repeat with more subtlety in The Rise of Life on Earth (1991).

Oates's second novella, All the Good People I've Left Behind, is less successful than her first. Coming as it does at the end of a collection, bearing its title, of shorter stories, All the Good People I've Left Behind reads less like a work aesthetically conceived as a novella than it does a short story; it follows the lives of two couples who met as idealistic graduate students at Ann Arbor in 1960 through 1976 in five dated sections, no doubt roughly up to the point at which the story was written. Its subject matter is similar to that of many of Oates's stories of the period. The Enrights, Alex and Fern, and the Mandels, Ted and Maxine, are young couples. The graduate student husbands, both “brilliant young men”²—Alex working on his doctorate in biochemistry, Max in philosophy—enjoy discussing philosophy together at faculty parties like the one thrown by Jerry and Deanna Hecht in the novella's opening section. The wives, on the other hand—though Maxine is the more intellectual of the two—are more concerned with gossip and speculations about domestic life, whether or not to have children.

The couples keep in touch over the years. The Enrights have children—a source of friction between Fern and Maxine—while the Mandels do not. Alex leaves academia to work for a chemical company and achieve a steady middle-class existence, while the seemingly prudish Fern drifts, out of boredom, into an affair. Ted, who never completes his dissertation on Hume to his satisfaction, drifts from one low-paying visiting professorship to another before settling into a relatively secure position at a community college, until the school has financial difficulties. The Mandels have an open marriage, a situation that proves more pleasing to Ted, a charismatic professor who attracts many young female students, than to the increasingly distraught Maxine, who begins to psychically degenerate when her marriage finally does break up, Ted taking off with one of his students hoping to live an idyllic life in Vermont.

Page for page, this novella is as readable and insightful as any of Oates's shorter fiction of this period, and its conclusion, with the suicide of one character and the recognition of an unspoken, unacted upon erotic attraction between two others, is dramatically satisfying. Yet Oates's one stylistic innovation here, an extensive use of long, qualifying parenthetical statements, ultimately serves no overall aesthetic purpose; it merely extends a story that would probably have been more effective as a story a third as long.

Oates's next novella, A Sentimental Education: Stories (1980), is far more carefully structured than People [All the Good People I've Left Behind], and a more solid accomplishment. A tale of love and murder among a wealthy East Coast family spending the summer on Sky Harbor, an island off the coast of Maine, the novella is told from an ironic perspective that gives its “happy” ending a chilling turn of the screw. The protagonist is nineteen-year-old Duncan Sargent, the son of a Georgetown physician; suffering from a psychic disorder resembling anorexia, he was forced to withdraw from all of his courses during his freshman year at Johns Hopkins. Obsessed with order, with living up to his father's reputation and his mother's expectations, he is convinced that “if he was genius, why then he was nothing. Simple as that. Pudgy, unattractive, nearsighted, cowardly.”³ Determined to spend the summer meticulously studying his textbooks so that he might reenter Johns Hopkins in the fall as a sophomore, he is a loner who spends much of his time in his imagination—at night in bed, “his secret time” (Sentimental [A Sentimental Education: Stories], 148), and during the day in his “secret cove” (Sentimental, 126) on the island.

But Duncan's private psychic retreat is invaded that summer by a younger cousin, Antoinette, with whom he falls in love and begins a furtive, secret affair that leaves him plagued with guilt; for, not unlike Bobbie Gotteson, Duncan is revolted by the lack of control he associates with the body:

Part of his sickness earlier that year had been his fear that other people would discover the truth about him. His unclean habits, his soiled clothing, his dirty body, his secret thoughts. … There were times when he disliked his mother very much and he feared she would guess. There were times when it seemed to him incredible that she should not guess. And that she should not know (and tell his father) every humiliating secret about him: the near-invisible dirt that lodged stubbornly between his fingers and his toes, and his neck, and on his groin; the vicious thoughts that sometimes careened crazily through his head like maddened birds.

(Sentimental, 154)

The irony is that when Duncan's disgust with the flesh, and with the lack of control over his passion for Antoinette, causes him to murder her after making love to her in “his” cove, no one suspects him of the murder, assuming it to have been committed by some of the youths who had been vandalizing the Sargents' property all summer.

The novella, then, culminates in murder and in a mother's willful belief that “‘Once we get back home and things return to normal, you'll feel much better,’” an opinion contradicted by Duncan “in a soft, rather dignified voice: ‘I don't think so, Mother’” (Sentimental, 196). Here, one is reminded of the fiction of John Cheever, specifically of “Goodbye, My Brother,” about a problematic family reunion on an island off the Massachusetts coast. In that story, a man strikes his brother in the head with a tree root with the intention of killing him, though instead he merely drives him away from the island. Cheever's clearly Christian view of the possibility of grace and redemption contrasts with Oates's starker, secular, ironic perception of human nature.

In her most recent novellas, Oates has used the form more experimentally than in A Sentimental Education: Stories, each with a different focus and all with powerful results. The first of these, I Lock My Door Upon Myself (1990), is “based” on the Fernand Khnopff painting of that name from 1891, which features the Pre-Raphaelite face of a red-headed woman, her face on her crossed hands, her eyes staring madly, Ophelia-like, at the viewer. To her right, there is an orange calla lily, and above that the white winged bust of a mythical god. The novella, narrated by Calla Freilicht Honeystone's granddaughter, tells the eerie story, justly compared to Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, of Calla's unhappy marriage, her doomed affair with a black man early this century in Oates' Eden County, and her death-in-life survival through much of the ensuing century. Brief, fable-like, written in rhapsodic prose that flows with the violence of the Chautauqua River, the novella sweeps the reader along as it does the rowboat containing Calla and her lover, Tyrell Thompson (a water diviner) over Tintern Falls, Tyrell to his physical and Calla to her psychic death. The book is best read as a companion volume to Oates's Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, a much longer and powerfully naturalistic novel set in the 1950s and 1960s in a small upstate New York city on a river.

While Because has all the strengths of a novel like them, dramatizing the profound impact that racism has on its white heroine, Iris Courtney, and its black hero, Jinx Fairchild, who killed a white punk to save Iris's life, I Lock My Door Upon Myself is a lyric reprise of this theme, emphasizing the persistence of racism in American society. But Oates's strongest achievement in this novella is the subtlety of its language, which sings like poetry from its very first lines, which begin with an ellipsis:

… there on the river, the Chautauqua, in a sepia sun, the rowboat bucking the choppy waves with a look almost of gaiety, defiance. And in the boat the couple: a man, rowing, a black man, the woman a white woman whose face is too distant to be seen. The man is rowing the boat downstream in a slightly jagged course yet with energy, purpose, the oars like blades rising and dropping and rising and again dropping, sinking into the water only to emerge again dripping and impatient; the woman is facing him, close, their knees touching, or so it appears from the shore.⁴

Oates's ear, her use of consonance and assonance is as deft as her eye—corresponding to the temporally complex narrative eye observing the scene from the shore as if in 1912, past and present conflating. The w's and v's and sibilant s's combined with the long a's and long and short o sounds to simulate the boat's choppy but steady movement in the river, while the juxtaposition of the soft w's with the hard b's—contrasting white and black—and d's attest to the extreme emotion contained in the scene, the white woman and black man locked in a defiant tableau for anyone on shore to observe.

From Eden County at the beginning of the century, Oates shifts to them's Detroit of the 1960s and early 1970s in The Rise of Life on Earth (1991), once again examining the inner thoughts of a serial murderer, though this one far less obvious, more subtly rendered than Bobbie Gotteson. Early in the novella there is a trial scene reminiscent of Triumph. On a hot summer day in Detroit in 1961, Joseph Hennessy, “forty-two years old, unemployed, formerly a metal worker, no prior police record though well known to the county welfare agency as a ‘difficult client,’”⁵ is charged with, among other things, beating his six-year-old daughter Nola to death in the motel room where he lived with his frequently absent wife and two daughters. Though he denies the charges, the eerie tape-recorded voice of his other daughter, eleven-year-old Kathleen, who was also badly beaten, is so effective when played back in the courtroom—“that bodiless child's voice profound because bodiless, that slow flat dull dazed hypnotized voice beyond any apparent capacity for subterfuge as it was beyond any apparent human volition” (Rise [The Rise of Life on Earth], 17-18)—that her father changes his plea to guilty; he will subsequently die in jail. But this narrative belongs to Kathleen, quiet, innocent-seeming Kathleen so reminiscent of them's Maureen Wendall, and Rise reads like a hypnotic case study focused on one character rather than on many, another path the abused Maureen's life could have taken; it is them in miniature.

It is Kathleen, we discover to our horror early on, who has killed her sister as brutally as Duncan Sargent killed his cousin, in a rage at realizing that her mother has abandoned her, disgusted with Nola's crying, “banging [her head] methodically against the floor to quiet her … [until] with astonishing abruptness, Nola stopped screaming, went limp, her little body limp” (Rise, 24). Moved from foster home to foster home—one of which she sets on fire—Kathleen, less intelligent than Maureen, keeps her rage hidden and, with the help of some motivational teachers and sheer willpower, eventually becomes a nurse's aide. She gains some emotional solace by joining a Christian group, and will always keep the set of rosary beads given her by a nurse when she was hospitalized at eleven. Kathleen also pursues a number of sexual affairs—none bringing her much pleasure—most notably an affair with a young intern, Orson Abbott, whose life she will destroy more deviously than Maureen Wendall did that of her hapless composition instructor, Jim Randolph. Oates evokes at once a kind of pity and macabre comic horror in her unflinching portrayal of Kathleen Hennessy's life.

Though it bears some resemblance to her fictions of upper middle-class life, Oates's most recent novella, Black Water (1992), is among the most audacious, original, and successful of her recent books. The novella is based on the tragic accident in 1969 when Mary Jo Kopechne was drowned in a car driven off a bridge in Chappaquiddick on Martha's Vineyard by Senator Edward Kennedy, who managed to save his own life even as he effectively ended his presidential hopes along with Kopechne's life. Oates's focus is not on The Senator (as he is called) but on the last hours of the life of the endlessly optimistic victim of the accident, Kelly Kelleher. The novella is not sensationalistic, but rather a model of ingenious narrating and nearly seamless poetic prose even more resonant than that in I Lock My Door Upon Myself. Chappaquiddick is a national nightmare that has arguably altered the course of American history, and Oates clearly has brooded upon the event for two decades. By setting the novella in the late 1980s, Oates is able to dramatize how the liberal promise represented by the Kennedy White House had by and large collapsed when George Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election, extending the Republican control of the White House begun by Ronald Reagan to twelve years. Kelly Kelleher is presented as a decent, educated, representative young woman, an idealist who wrote her senior thesis at Brown on “The Senator,” who worked for the Dukakis campaign and was genuinely shocked by his defeat, and who, at the time of her death, was employed by a liberal political journal in Boston and taught remedial courses, albeit with a sense of frustration, in Roxbury. Living in the age of AIDS, Kelly meticulously carries a condom in her purse, though she has not found an occasion to use it since the painful breakup of a serious relationship sometime before the events of the fateful Fourth of July, on Grayling Island off the coast of Maine, that form the novella's narrative backbone.

The novella opens with a brief chapter describing the accident, a scene Oates circles back to throughout the narrative, juxtaposing it with scenes chronicling Kelly and The Senator's mutual attraction; The Senator's good-natured but excessive drinking; The Senator's escape from the car, using Kelly's body for leverage and leaving one of his shoes behind in her hands; and Kelly's reflections on her life and her family as she struggles to stay alive in the shrinking air pocket in the Toyota sunken “in black rushing water,”⁶ confident that The Senator will return to save her life.

Of course, as readers we know the novella's outcome, but its final lines are unusually haunting, with Kelly finally “raising her arms to be lifted high kicking in the air as the black water filled her lungs, and she died” (Water [Black Water], 154). In Black Water we experience both the tragic death of a young woman, whom we have come to know well in this compact but wide-ranging work, and, more broadly, the tragic limitations of our politicians, however noble their political ideals may be. The novella is heartbreaking.

If Joyce Carol Oates's novellas began as experiments in form, freeing her from the conventions of the traditional novel and short story at which she excelled so early in her prodigious career, they have become, in near-perfect work like Black Water, a form she has made uniquely her own.

Notes

1. The Triumph of the Spider Monkey (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1976), 11; hereafter cited in text as Triumph.

2. “All the Good People I've Left Behind,” in All the Good People I've Left Behind (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1979), 145-227, 152; hereafter cited in text as People.

3. “A Sentimental Education,” in A Sentimental Education : Stories (New York: Dutton, 1980), 113-96, 147; hereafter cited in text as Sentimental.

4. I Lock My Door upon Myself (New York: Ecco Press, 1990), 3.

5. The Rise of Life on Earth (New York: New Directions, 1991), 11; hereafter cited in text as Rise.

6. Black Water (New York: Dutton, 1992), 6; hereafter cited in text as Water.