Book review: ‘Sourland’ by Joyce Carol Oates

Although American fiction offers few distinctive voices at present, there is no mistaking a Joyce Carol Oates story for anyone else’s. You could tear off the cover of her latest collection, “Sourland,” and identify these stories from their opening lines alone.

“Four years old she’d begun to hear in fragments and patches like handfuls of torn clouds the story of the stabbing in Manhattan that was initially her mother’s story.” (“The Story of the Stabbing”)

“Is there a soul I have to wonder. Look inside myself like leaning over the rim of an old stone well and the danger is, you might lose your balance and fall and there is no water inside to break your fall.” (“Bounty Hunter”)

“Midday, early spring, sunshine in steel bars flashing on the river, she drove to meet him where he’d summoned her.” (“Babysitter”)

Not just their virtuosity but also their aura of menace make them hers. Bad things happen in Oates’ stories. But worse: They are chosen. The quintessential Oates story is a nightmare that the hapless (usually female) heroine has somehow brought on herself. However horrifying the situation — promising whatever violence or loss — culpability is the kicker.

We think of Oates, like Poe, as a master of terror, but her real mastery is in almost never depicting a strong emotion in isolation. It’s the counter-current that damns her subjects: contempt undercut by desire, fear tempered by the wish to please.

In “Babysitter,” a suburban housewife and mother drives into the city for a hotel tryst that turns out to be a degrading near-rape. Nevertheless, she falls in love. “In all marriages there is the imbalance,” she had reflected on the way there, “one who loves more than the other. One who licks wounds in secret, the rust-taste of blood.” If she’d hoped to overcome her sense of being the less-loved, her experience with her brutal lover strangely re-enacts the imbalance of her marriage. He chokes her. When he releases the pressure on her arteries, she adores him for letting her live.

The flustered recent widow in “Probate” commits some unnamed error at the Trenton, N.J., probate court and enters a Kafka-esque hell of windowless rooms, strip searches and bureaucratic cruelties. Instructed to put on a smock and paper slippers, she comes unhinged: “How the gigantic pulse in Adrienne’s head throbbed! She’d become confused. It had begun to seem probable to her that her husband was still alive — not yet dead — and that Adrienne had come to the hospital herself, to the first-floor radiation unit where women went for mammograms.”

Although Oates is not an autobiographical writer in any simple sense of the term, these stories register her shock and grief after the 2008 death of her husband, Raymond Smith, as if, a door having swung open, the writer can’t help but describe what she sees. Probate court and recent widows recur, as well as sudden hospitalizations — women and children unprotected in the wake of loss. Unconsoling at the best of times, Oates makes for a caustic companion in “Sourland” — a fearless experimenter forcing the reader ahead of her at knifepoint. Where I’ve been, she says, there you will go.

Marler is the editor of “Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America on to Sex.”