Flak Magazine: Faithless, 3-16-01

Joyce Carol Oates' name has come to be synonymous with merciless fiction about alienation and obsession. But the first story in "Faithless: Tales of Transgression" opens with an almost unimaginably gentle tone. Could this be the same writer whose direct, dangerous prose has virtually leapt from the pages of her work, especially her short stories, for decades? Could Oates be going soft?

Never fear. The opening story is merely the prelude to a collection of tales as dark and forceful as anything Oates has written before.

"Faithless" consists of 24 stories presented in three sections. The stories are grouped roughly thematically although Oates titles the sections only Parts One, Two and Three; the first group of stories is about sex, the second families and the third violence. But it is not a forced division — there is violence in the families section, sex in the violence section, families in the sex section and so on.

Historically, these are Oates' favorite topics, and her consistent style holds the book together. She reuses distinctive words — "fleshy," "brattish" — that seem inconsequential but give the stories a singular, cohesive feel. She also repeats character and place names (most of them based in her home state of New Jersey, where she's a professor at Princeton). Considered as a group, the stories blend into each other purposefully, creating a terrifying but realistic world.

At its best, "Faithless" strikes a reader's very core. In "Ugly," one of the most compelling stories, a young woman works at a dismal diner, serving boorish customers and desperately grasping at her sanity. Two sisters in the title story cope with being abandoned by a "faithless" mother. A social worker in "The Stalker" recovers (or, more aptly, doesn't recover) from an assault committed by a client's crazed husband and the ensuing attention from the man who saved her. A woman in "What Then, My Life?" recalls being raped by two older cousins at her grandmother's farm when she was young.

Oates has not abandoned other old themes either — physical beauty or the lack thereof, and abused or ignored or lonely women. She also ventures successfully into new territory, such as the mind of a Columbine-era teenager. "Tusk" offers an honor-roll-nerd-turned-hellraiser of a 13-year-old who brings his dead father's knife to school with him — "A souvenir from 'Nam. You had to wonder how many gooks the knife had killed, right?"

Her male characters are certainly as good as her females, even if they are not as familiar. "Tusk," although not as strong as much of the collection, is a solid story and a welcome risk. "A High School Sweetheart: A Mystery" is a curiously self-referential piece about a writer presenting a piece of autobiography to a group of colleagues from whom he has received an award. Although it is not the most successful story in "Faithless," it is provocative and thrillingly executed.

At her worst, Oates can grow a bit morbid and overwhelming. Page after page of despair and loneliness can become almost too much to bear in a 400-page book from an author obsessed with death. Part Three, the violence section, especially drags a bit; a strong-handed editor might have questioned some of the longer stories and the repetitive word choice. The seamless blending of the stories resulting from the use of such techniques can become a dizzying distraction when overused.

But on the whole, the collection's cohesiveness is its greatest strength. Oates' diction is precise and evocative, even while she uses three or four semicolons and a dozen commas in a single sentence, such as this one — a thought from the five-year-old girl in "A Manhattan Romance."

Next we went — we walked, and the limousine followed — to the Museum of Modern Art, where again there was the crowd, again I was breathless riding escalators, I was trapped behind tall people seeing legs, the backs of coats, swinging arms; Daddy lifted me to his shoulder and carried me, and brought me into a large, airy room; a room of unusual proportions; a room not so crowded as the others; there were tears in Daddy's eyes as he held me in his arms — his arms that trembled just slightly — to gaze at an enormous painting — several paintings — broad beautiful dreamy-blue paintings of a pond, and water lilies; Daddy told me that these paintings were by a very great French artist named 'Mon-ay' and that there was magic in them; he told me that these paintings made him comprehend his own soul, or what his soul had been meant to be; for as soon as you left the presence of such beauty, you were lost in the crowd; you were devoured by the crowd; it would be charged against you that it was your own fault but in fact — "They don't let you be good, Princess."

Impressive, that one sentence. Even more so because it actually makes sense, capturing the child's jumbled thoughts and fitting perfectly within the context of the story. And although her varied narrators' voices prove she's widened her scope, old fans will not be disappointed. "Faithless" is clearly the work of the veteran author who's written countless short stories and novels.

The last story, "In *Copland*," features an investigative television reporter as an extremely unreliable narrator. It's left up to the reader to decide if the man is delusional, hallucinating a terrifying underground police fantasy world. It's possibly the most violent story in a collection of violent stories — but it's also more vague than most of Oates' work.

Oates, throughout her career, has toed the line of believability. Can the threatening world she creates really be the same one we inhabit, willfully pushing away the loneliness and horror she describes? Most of the time, too much of the time, the answer is yes.

— Gwen Glazer (grglazer at netscape dot net)