Digging Deep Into the Roots of Evil

Raven’s Wing by Joyce Carol Oates (Dutton: $16.95)

Once again, in this collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates addresses herself to the question of human evil; no one on Earth is better at this dubious pastime. The theme in these tales is abandonment; the withdrawal of all--what we think of as “human”--caring. Once that sense of caring, or compassion, or even obligation, is gone, every sin is possible; even inevitable.

The change here, from some of Oates’ earlier work, is that in the past this genius of the macabre has been at pains to remind the complacent reader that the gulf between “us” and “them,” the “good” folks and the “bad” ones, is largely a question of perception and imagination; that good and evil are inextricably combined, etc., etc.

Here, in “Raven’s Wing,” Oates seems to have moved off that philosophical position. Like Dante, she has finally created a true inferno, populated by monsters of evil--monsters all the more hideous because they’ve given up even the idea of those two possibilities: They are fully evolved sociopaths, and the fearsome message here is that this rejection of any moral imperative permeates all of our society, not just the poor, the downtrodden, the uneducated, the deprived. . . .

The most spectacularly extreme of these stories deals with the utter dregs of America. How and why Oates is so at home in our national lower depth is a subject that defies comprehension. But there it is; her perceptions are perfect down there with the marginal and the homeless, the spiritually bereft.

In “Little Wife,” a runaway girl is picked up by three or four drifters, taken out to a home that one of them has found, and in some kind of hideous perversion of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” becomes housekeeper, mother, “little wife,” communal whore, prisoner of love. The story is seen through the eyes of the young son of one of the men--a 12-year-old who goes to school, comes home to do his homework, shuts himself up in an attic room, doing everything he can to close off the gambling, drinking, unattractive fornication, and other unsavory activities of the adult world that surround him. Then all that “love” turns to physical atrocity. Soon the girl lies dying in her own little room, while the men carouse and the dirty dishes pile up. What action the young boy finally takes saves him morally but catapults him out into a contingent hell.

“Testimony” continues this ghoulish line of imagination. Again, the narrative is told through the voice and mind of an adolescent girl who lives in a low-life beach town with her low-life mom.

The girl hangs out on a pier and falls “in love” with a guy who bills himself as a photo-journalist, and drapes himself in garlands of cameras to prove it. The man gives the girl a glass ring as a “love pledge” and enlists her as a participant in an “experiment.”

Tortured to Death

Together they befriend a runaway barely into her teens, take her to his apartment and systematically torture her to death. But the “experiment”--though never explicitly spelled out by the girl who tells the story--is that although the runaway is raped, beaten, burned, tattooed, etched with pocket knives and obviously scheduled to die within the week, she prefers this monster-life to the one she’s run from: “There was a time he shouted at her to call the police, he held out the phone to her, but she wouldn’t, I guess she was waiting for him to love her, she was waiting for things to get okay the way you naturally do.”

But this cruelty, this insanity, this pure hatred and monstrousness cannot be explained by poverty (although, Oates implies, it’s harder to conceal the truly monstrous without the convenient shellac of money and education).

In “The Jesuit,” a woman who’s separated from her husband is forced by circumstance to go to work in a Catholic college: “Of the five or six teachers at the college with whom she was acquainted, only one, a young Jesuit whose office was adjacent to hers, seemed to dislike her. In fact, he hated her. He would stare at her with a loathing that seemed almost pure, it was so impersonal.”

The woman ponders every reason, tries every little ploy to shake his hatred, but her efforts are utterly futile: It would be easier to teach a tiger to play the harmonica than to shake this man of God from his implacable hatred and contempt.

Finally, two particularly horrifying stories prove, in Oatesian terms, that evil is not connected to poverty or societal disease. They also reveal a kind of moral revulsion that--I believe--has never been present in her earlier work. We are not all the same, she seems to be saying. Some of us are definitely worse than others; there are some sins that are beyond at least some of us, and are, finally, unforgivable.

In “The Seasons,” a third-rate playwright and his distraught sweetheart almost build a relationship. They live in houses lent to them by absent professors; exist on marginal one-term writers-in-residence gigs. But the couple “love each other,” indeed they do. As they “play house,” they even acquire a couple of cats, who--by the end of the story--the violent pusillanimous playwright finally abandons in the countryside. Then, as he drives away, he spies them in the rear view mirror: “He tells himself that, if the kittens make the slightest gesture of reconciliation, he will take them back home.”

Whew! It’s as if after all the long, braided, beautifully delineated narrative threads Oates has ever spun are finally beginning to knot together in inevitable conclusions. In “Ancient Airs, Voices,” she takes as premise a teen-age suicide and then spins out from that a “story” of two couples and a years-long, suburban tale of adultery. Oh, those young, daring, trendy and outrageous parents! Finally, after the kid is dead and the affair is over, the lover can still say to the other man’s wife, “The thing is . . . that nobody was hurt. That’s the important thing.”

It’s likely that “we” don’t know anyone who will torture a runaway to death with cigarettes and shards of glass. It’s equally likely that “we” have had that Jesuit, that playwright, and those suburban couples over to dinner--and will again. Think about that, Oates reminds us. And remember the very worst circle in hell.