A Life Adrift in Poverty That Is Spiritual as Well as Physical

Joyce Carol Oates is hardly unsung, and in “Man Crazy” she does what amounts to a star turn: She tells a kind of story she practically invented.

The protagonist and narrator, Ingrid Boone, grows up in the half-tamed wilderness and half-savage towns of western New York. She is scarred by family violence and deformed by her own ravenous need for love. She sinks into a hell of sex, drugs and submission to abusive men and emerges, in that curious way of Oates’ heroines, apparently whole but also disconcertingly brittle, as if the pieces of her soul have been stuck back together with nothing more substantial than Elmer’s glue.

Ingrid’s antecedents go back at least to Maureen Wendall, the schoolgirl-turned-prostitute in Oates’ “them,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. Oates’ persistence in mining this subject matter makes us wonder about, and marvel at, the author’s famously focused, articulate and successful identification with, and compassion for, characters who are none of these things.

John Updike, in “Bech Is Back,” critiqued a number of thinly disguised contemporary writers, including Oates. Everything she writes, he said, resonates with the implicit statement that I was poor; it evokes the childhood humiliation of second-hand clothes, the ache of neglected teeth.

This is surely true, but the poverty of which Oates writes is spiritual at least as much as physical.

As “Man Crazy” opens, 6-year-old Ingrid is watching her family break up. Her father, Lucas, a former combat pilot in Vietnam, is handsome, loving and charismatic, but a killer. Her mother, Chloe, flees him, living in shabby rented houses and working at dress shops in one Chautauqua-area town after another.

Chloe is beautiful, and sees her beauty as the only asset that can keep her and Ingrid above the level of “trash.” It’s like a Hollywood story, except that the lovers Chloe hopes will save her aren’t movie moguls but insurance agents and owners of lumberyards. And salvation, Ingrid learns, comes with a price.

“Momma was terrified of being really poor, dirt-poor, and men would know, always men can sniff out the degree of your desperation, Momma believed, and force you to do things you don’t want to do or don’t exactly want to do at that time or in that place or in that way.”

Lucas reappears just often enough to win Ingrid’s devotion. Then he devastates her and Chloe with a final act of violence and leaves.

In high school, reputed to be an “easy lay,” Ingrid knows dimly what drives her, but knowledge is no help: “Crazy for men, they say it’s really your own daddy you seek. I hope this is so, maybe someday I’ll find him.”

What she finds instead is a man just as charismatic as Lucas and even more dangerous--Enoch Skaggs, leader of a Manson-esque gang of bikers and Satanists. Ingrid joins his harem and witnesses ritual murders. It’s familiar headline stuff, but melodrama for Oates has never been an end in itself; it’s her way of gaining insight into character, of calling attention to the slightly quieter desperation in which more of us live than we would like to admit.

Ingrid is not destroyed, as seems inevitable. She emerges from a Waco-like holocaust with “every drop of poison squeezed from my blood,” determined “to do the right thing always, to love the right people.”

How? We don’t see it happen, as we saw Maureen’s painful ascent from catatonia in “them.”

Though “Man Crazy” is often better written, some of the old power leaks away through its neat, elliptical structure--through the gaps that we, having read so many Oates stories by now, are expected to fill in by ourselves.