Affairs of the heart
Joyce Carol Oates’ stories demonstrate her mastery of a range of genres, from gothic to science fiction, writes
The title of Joyce Carol Oates’s new collection of stories, Beautiful Days, is drawn from Les Beaux Jours, a painting by Balthus of a girl reclining in a chair and examining herself in a hand mirror, while a faceless man tends the fireplace behind her. But it might equally refer to “Fleuve Blue” or “Big Burnt,” the first two stories in the book – which are about (among other things) the strange disconnection that separates our romantic lives from the rest of life. “Fleuve Blue” describes an affair between a smalltown lawyer and a younger woman, whom he first sees walking across a bridge. He thinks, “I will marry her. That one.” Except, of course, he’s already married. Later, he offers her a ride when she gets caught wearing high heels in a downpour and they start meeting in the afternoon in a rented room. “She told him it would be the inside-out of the rest of her life, her relationship with him . ... She meant, what they had together was a counter-world . ... ‘Because I’m always lying. In that other life. In my “real” life. I tell people – I tell myself – “I live for my children.’” Unsurprisingly, their affair turns out to be susceptible to the same sort of forces that she wants to escape in her real life – boredom and the passage of time.
But it’s the lying, or deception, or really just the uncertainty about other people that dominates the rest of this collection. A woman desperate for marriage spends a weekend with a guy she used to date who hasn’t always been particularly nice to her. She doesn’t know that he’s tying up loose ends before killing himself, and afterwards she has to deal with the puzzle of his intentions. Even years of shared life fail to produce real intimacy. Parents are just as untrustworthy as lovers. In “Owl Eyes,” a geeky kid at a maths camp runs into a professor who tells him a story about how he used to be involved with the boy’s mother — that he used to be a father to the boy himself. Vague memories come back to the boy, but it’s hard to tell if they offer doubt or hope.
In general, Oates is dealing here with the academic world – professors and their kids, editors, writers, adjuncts – people who live in the provinces, on the outskirts of real success. Characters are often referred to by titles rather than names: mother, daddy, wife, husband, professor. “Except You Bless Me,” one of the standouts in a very strong collection, recounts an early incident in a woman’s teaching career. She has become convinced that a black student in her class – one she’s been trying to help – has been sending her racist hate messages. Is the professor unusually patient and conscientious or completely delusional and possibly racist herself?
Slowly the realism of the collection gives way to stories that are more experimental. Oates is a master of many different kinds of story, including the gothic and something like science fiction – “Fractal,” for example, and the extraordinary “Undocumented Alien,” which follows a Nigerian man tricked into applying for a bogus degree at a New Jersey college. Eventually, to
stop himself from being deported, he agrees to take part in a secret government experiment designed to test the extent to which people can be denatured. The power of the conceit, of course, comes from the fact that this is happening anyway.
This is Oates’s real trick, that her formal games and realism tend to reinforce each other – they make the same case. That title story, “Les Beaux Jours,” imagines Balthus’s painting from the girl’s point of view. She’s a privileged New Yorker who starts haunting the Metropolitan Museum after her father leaves the family and manages, somehow, to become a model for her favourite artist. It’s a kind of Rapunzel tale in reverse, where the girl who is caught in the real world dreams of being imprisoned in the tower. She is seeking “something she could not have defined – the consolation of art, the impersonality of art, the escape of art.” At least until she gets there.