Joyce Carol Oates' Faithless Is a Joyless Task, with a Repetitive, Groaning Refrain of "Nobody Wins"

One of the many damaged readers in my family turned me on to Joyce Carol Oates in 1990. Eyes closed, the damaged reader said to me, "It's too strong. I had to keep putting it down. You try." And into my lap she dropped Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, Oates' fat, sweeping wartime (pick a war, any war) epic of drunk Mommy and verboten interracial love. I didn't hate the novel, but I certainly didn't like the way Oates was breathlessly playing me with her herniated attempts at how real people think: Love me! I know you want to. Admittedly, some of the images in Bitter (once-glamorous drunk Mommy having DTs and picking red ants out of her pubic hair, precocious central female character raped by a carload of black men) have stuck to me like a squirt of wrong perfume.

After finishing Bitter, and after finishing the sackload of other Joyce Carol Oates novels and short-story collections that the damaged reader had dumped on my lap from 1990 until now, I've noticed that a sickish (that's one of my favorite kinda meaninglessish words from the JCO lexicon) feeling pervades my bowels for some time after. Who needs it? Her stories are a drag, and they almost cost me a place to live?I nearly got myself drop-kicked out of a recovery house last year for attaching myself to my sneaked copy of Blonde (2000), her Marilyn Monroe bio, because I was making like it was some kind of fucking teat: "The ultimate non-blonde on the ultimate blonde! Olive Oyl does the White Goddess! Come on!" But I was doing a bad job of lying to myself, for I didn't really believe that Blonde was smarter and more therapeutic than the bookcase full of acceptable Harlequin tripe we were allowed to nod out behind. Again, post-Blonde, there was a sense of being wrenched dry by a tide of demanding dry heaves, and I don't mean wrenched in the cathartic sense. I was just glad it was over with, for I had finally reached JCO critical mass.

I have come to this carefully honed conclusion after finishing Faithless: Tales of Transgression (Ecco/Harper Collins, 386 pages, $27), her latest collection of short-story color-by-numbers riffage: Joyce Carol Oates is more prolific than a brood sow, indeed. She knows how to map fine lines of wreckage embedded in the broke and the well-to-do of Rust Belt upstate New York. Fuck, she's been doing her thing for almost 40 years. She's always putting out something fat and new.

But not new. I am tired of keeping up with her italicized crap. If you are also a cat in the burlap bag of JCO prose, you need to claw the hell out.

Starting with 1989's You Must Remember This (hot, bittersweet incest saga) and continuing on through the 90s, Oates was on a roll, and she released a big family epic just about once a year. If you were doggie-paddling in her chummy wake around this time, you might not have noticed, but the nadir came quick: We Were the Mulvaneys (1996) hastily, cheerily ended, and not a moment too soon. Long before the close of the book I had a mental list going. Graphically sullied, young and wickedly two-faced but inherently good main character? Check. Gets her revenge, spiritually? Check. Alcoholic, devastated parent? Dad, this time. Check. Untamed passions sluicing under the ice age of pre-Pill Americana? Check. Examination of the two faces worn by your average bozo on the bus?the daily mask of checkout counter smiles and good grammar, and the uneasy relation to its slurring punctuation-free paragraph-chewing savage twin underneath? Check! JCO has got the genre sussed, flow-charted and ready-made, and by Mulvaneys it was dead like a dried-up Premarin mare.

Under the weight of her full-length novels, it's harder to see what kind of Scary Movie JCO has become, but when she's wind-sprinting in the largely bilious short stories in Faithless and flogging along characters we don't get to know too well (and don't want to get to know), the fact that the shtick is tired is obvious. Working back from the end of the book, where the stories are truly emetic?the final one being a vile fantasy of a Hard Copy type of tv personality who gets abducted (and Abnered) by once-kindly policemen to the infernal "Copland," a warehouse of vicious cop delights and sodomy via "drum majorette's baton" ("[o]r it's a toilet plunger with a wooden handle, they're jamming into me"). "The rising of terror like backed-up sewage," JCO writes of her victim's fear (hasn't she used this line in everything she's ever written?), and by the end of the story, he is left disabled, useless, out-of-work, upper-middle-class and perhaps abandoned by his wife and dog.

An "intensely private" suspense writer named R_ is inducted for public office, and by way of an acceptance speech at the ceremony, he reads "The High School Sweetheart: A Mystery," wherein a lovelorn sophomore nobody named Roland slips barbiturates in his popular crush's soda and kills her during after-school drama practice, never to be caught. The revenge of the geek outsider, retold by a poker-faced middle-aged suspense writer of some repute, is something JCO might know something about, but when she tries, in "Tusk," to get into the mind and on the tongue of a present-day high school boy (also a former geek named Roland, and who, in this story, renames himself Tusk) who sneaks his dad's knife into his backpack before school one day, JCO is out of her league. "Amazing to Tusk how shit-faced ordinary this day is," she writes. She uses the same profane phrase for the comely feminine wound that she's been using for decades: "...it comes to him in a flash Stick Alyse. In her sweet cunt." Tusk eventually snaps, but instead of stabbing Alyse, the semi-slutty girl he has a hard-on for, he sticks the fat hippie behind the counter at the 7-Eleven. The story ends quickly after that, with Tusk behind the 7-Eleven, crouched next to the dumpster, clumsily trying to slit his throat with the knife. Here, JCO spews forth with her usual micro/macro take on cosmic senselessness: "...recalling what he'd learned in science class of how the sun is promised to continue shining for five billion more years before at last swelling and vaporizing the entire solar system but Tusk could not endure even one more day."

I'm sure JCO is consciously trying to capture the dysthymia of the daily trudge in "Tusk" (and in Faithless on the whole), and maybe I've been bred to expect some kind of elation, some kind of surprise, even in something as thrashed as JCO's brand of backed-up sewage. But Faithless is a joyless task, with a repetitive, groaning refrain of "nobody wins." Didn't we all know that already? Even the damaged reader, who has avidly pursued JCO since the Gothic sprawl of Bellefleur (1980), barely limped past "Au Sable" (elderly father-in-law jovially and vaguely tells his son-in-law, by phone, that he and his wife are committing suicide; JCO already gassed this theme in an earlier short-story collection) and "Ugly," a vituperative tale of a waitress who loathes herself and eats the remains off her customers' plates. These are the first and second stories, respectively, in Faithless.

JCO describes (and I know she's used this before, too) her "In Copland" victim's desperate thoughts: "I'm an American citizen, I'm an optimist, I want to love you. I love you." While another "enormous cop-cock" is jammed down his throat. I'm not going to force myself to love or even respect Faithless while she's reaming me, but I wouldn't mind if JCO freshens up, puts on the brakes and stops saddling her cookie-cutter bozos with her routinely heavyweight darknesses.