Book Reviews : Minimalist Approach to Storytelling

The Assignation: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates (The Ecco Press; $16.95; 192 pages)

When there are 41 separate “stories” in 192 pages, words like vignette, fragment and note leap unbidden to the mind, but what publisher would risk one of those on a dust jacket? The public for apercus is smaller than the public for haggis, and not nearly as keen. Though “The Assignation,” “Senorita,” “The Bystander,” “Shelter” and one or two others top 1,500 words, the majority of the pieces here are literary minimalism at its sparest--a do-it-yourself Oates kit for enthusiasts.

Consider “One Flesh,” quoted in its entirety.

“They are sitting at opposite ends of the old horsehair sofa waiting for something to happen. A rainy summer night, or is it a rainy autumn night, smelling of wet leaves. A muffled reedy music permeates the room like remembered music in which rhythm is blurred. One by one enormous soft-winged insects fly toward them, or scuttle above their heads on the ceiling. Several clocks tick in unison, sounding like a single clock.”

Story or Idea?

Still, whether this is a story or merely the idea for a story may not matter so much as the fact that it’s pure essence of Oates, as readily recognizable as a shard of willow ware or a smithereen of Roman glass. All the hallmarks of the author’s style are here in microcosm; a hyper-acute sense of time, the characteristic ambiguity, the ominous presence of animal life, the implied sexual tension. Though the people have neither names, physical traits or even gender, they’re clearly Oates people; uneasy, poised and expectant, ready for the worst.

One way and another, even the most fragile of these perceptions conveys a sense of the writer’s methods and her astonishing versatility. Just a single unpunctuated sentence, “Slow” nevertheless catches its subject at the moment her life will irrevocably change. Within a mere page and a half, “The Boy” manages to be a full-length drama of temptation, seduction and abandonment. In “Romance,” one of the most substantial narratives, a respectable middle-aged man gives a hooker a lift to her house. We know he’s middle-aged because he takes pills to lower his blood pressure, but we know the girl is a hooker by accretion. One broad hint after another until it seems incredible that the driver could be so slow to catch on, could have persuaded himself even for a minute that she was only a schoolgirl late for supper.

Certain Oates’ preoccupations surface time and again. Twins appear in various guises; in “Anecdote” merely as the passing thought of a woman whose lover ignores her in the street, wounding her deeply. She consoles herself with the fantasy that her lover could have an identical twin; an irrational notion, but one that’s preferable to the truth.

An Unfulfilled Yearning

The subject of “Desire” is a man so tormented by loneliness that he marries and divorces serially, fathering children with each new bride. Never fulfilled, he realizes that he’s yearned less for a wife and family than for a brother. One day, at the age of 57, he accidentally discovers why he’s felt so deprived all his life, an explanation that is quintessential Oates.

Though “The Assignation” presents virtually every facet of the author’s formidable and distinctive imagination, the book is really just a sampler. Pick the persona and the mood you prefer from her vast gallery, and there’s bound to be either a full-scale book to match or one in progress. These settings, characters and incidents are so typical of the major work that they might be leaves of a novel blown out of a window to flutter about the countryside, salvaged and published by an ardent admirer. While calling them stories is stretching the definition, the collection is certainly a favor to future Oates scholars, spared the job of locating the small and obscure publications in which much of this ephemera first appeared.