Loss at length
Joyce Carol Oates’ absorbing book follows a family trying to deal with tragedy, but it does go on a bit.
His widow, Jessalyn, has been the perfect Ladies Home Journal American wife and mother. We may be in Trump’s America, but she belongs to Eisenhower’s. There are five children, all grown-up, in years anyway, even if none is perhaps emotionally adult. The oldest, Thom, married with children, runs one branch of the family business efficiently. Thom is the first to recognise that the cause of Whitey’s death is not what it seems and that there has been a police cover-up.
The second is Beverley, also married with children, a career wife and mother in what is now an outdated style, and already tippling; her response to the death will see her teeter into alcoholism. Number three is Lorene, a high school principal, capable and intense, already emotionally disturbed. “You could not easily imagine her as a girl. You could not easily imagine her as female.” Apparently selfsufficient, is she heading for a breakdown?
Daughter three is Sophia, the prettiest and nicest. She works as a researcher in a laboratory and lacks self-confidence.
Finally there is Virgil, not quite the black sheep of the family, not quite a drop-out, an artist (of sorts), an idealist, who lives in a sort of commune. Thom, Beverley and Lorene all dislike him and disapprove of him, with his pony-tail, disreputable friends and perhaps ambiguous sexuality. Whitey never understood him but, as his will shows, treated him as the equal of his brother and sisters.
The first concern of the children is for their mother. She and Whitey were such a couple. Can she manage without him? For a time indeed it seems she can’t. Will she remain the bereaved widow or will she adjust to a new life, and can the children accept that as a possibility?
The novel traces their lives over the year that follows Whitey’s death. What follows is sometimes surprising, never incredible because the characters and their situation have been so thoroughly imagined.
This book is absorbing, but it is also very long. Oates has a wide vocabulary but the word “economy” doesn’t feature in it. Scenes are prolonged for paragraphs after their point has been made. Though she writes mostly in short sentences, they pile up one after the other, and it will be a very patient and dutiful reader who doesn’t yield to the temptation of skipping or just letting the eye flick over a page or two.
Though style and setting are very different, there are ways in which Oates recalls late Iris Murdoch novels. There is
the same utter belief in what she is doing, the same extravagance and the same ability to persuade you to read on; also, I suspect, the same refusal to accept editorial revision even if such revision might have improved the novel.
Yet, despite the author’s self-indulgence, repetitiveness and verbosity, the novel works. It holds the attention, rings true, and gives pleasure. The subject – how you accommodate to loss – is real and important, and the characters have a credibility that is rare in much fashionable fiction today. Joyce Carol Oates writes about other people, not about herself. Which is a relief. the network of murder and torture that crosses two continents.
The juxtaposition of the two policing styles provides wry humour and as the pressure mounts on both forces to find the final victim, the reader is swept along by their growing sense of desperation.
The plot is a complicated one, but Robertson is a master storyteller – sensitive, realistic, terrifying and humorous – and Watch Him Die is never less than gripping.