Love’s Labor’s Lost

Author of 29 novels, 19 short story collections and some 36 other books, Joyce Carol Oates is not merely a writer; she is an issue. It is impossible to review a new book by her without wondering if she publishes too much, or without wondering if it’s right to wonder whether she publishes too much. And yet one can hardly, at this point, approach each new book as if it were an isolated event. Still, her graphomania would not matter at all, if such a large part of what she wrote were not mediocre. And the mediocrity wouldn’t matter either, except that when she is good, she is very good.

Oates has a rare gift, and it strives to be released from her fictions, as if it were a half-sculpted figure trapped in a marble block. Her novels are usually between two and three rewrites away from being finished works of art. The products of her imagination are partly the fruit of a truly original, creative mind and partly the disorganized, self-indulgent jottings of a woman confiding her fears and obsessions to her diary.

On the occasion of “Middle Age: A Romance,” it is clear that again she has written a novel too fast to be meaningfully good. Here she is, describing a married couple in a crisis:

“Always they slept in a single bed by custom; for their marriage was sanctified by Custom. (Except when Lionel was forced to be away overnight in Manhattan, or was out of town on business, which was frequently the case in recent years. Then they slept in separate beds.) Their intense, separate, far-flung bouts of sleep.

“For sleep is not one, but many. These regions of the soul inaccessible to all others save the sleeper; and even the sleeper is helpless to determine the course of dreaming, the spillage of emotions. No matter how others press against us, or grasp us in our arms. Take me with you. Where are you going? Don’t you love me?”

The passage holds Oates’ essential virtue and her essential deficiency. The vision of a husband and wife, who still need each other, yet find themselves drifting away from each other along the inexorable axis of their secret desires, is poetic and moving. But Oates never says anything once when she can ring three or four senseless changes on it. There seems to be some strange insecurity at the bottom of Oates’ self-important prolixity; perhaps she writes so much in order to flee from some fundamental doubt.

Reflexively, she shoves platitude like a crutch under her originality: “Their marriage was sanctified by Custom.” The oppressiveness of custom, you see. And she seems to fear that not acknowledging a detail of plot will be held against her, thus the long unnecessary parenthesis--we are told this information elsewhere--that bursts what should be the intense, quiet unity of the passage.

Finally she must provide commentary on her own creative intuition--”For sleep is not one, but many” et cetera--when all she might need is: “Always they slept in a single bed. Their intense, separate, far-flung bouts of sleep. No matter how others press against us, or grasp us in our arms. Take me with you. Where are you going?”

If only Oates trusted her powerful poetic apprehension in a moment like this, then maybe she could trust her readers to apprehend her poetic meaning, and it is her inherent suspicion of herself that afflicts “Middle Age” as a whole. An tale about the quintessential American phenomenon of breaking free and starting over, the novel’s protagonists are couples mostly in their 50s, with some in their late 40s and one in her late 30s. Haunted by the passage of time, they suddenly enter a state of flux, thrust out of their familiar world, the affluent and privileged world of WASP-y Salthill, N.Y., into a strange new solitude.

Lionel Hoffmann leaves his mentally frail wife, Camille, for a younger woman, a physical therapist who is treating him for what he believes are spinal pains related to his lack of a sexual outlet. Roger Cavanaugh, a high-powered and seemingly heartless corporate attorney, is abandoned by his harridan-spouse, Lee Ann, and left to struggle with his field-hockey-playing daughter Robin, an angry adolescent who likes to torture her father with cruel e-mails and vicious lies. Harry Tierney, the virile laughing nihilist, dumps his wife, the beautiful and sensuous Abigail, who pursues an incestuous passion for her teenage son. Augusta Cutler, randy, buxom and brassy, leaves her mild-mannered patrician husband, Owen, and goes West, strewing casual affairs behind her, finally taking up with Elias West, the private detective her husband has hired to find her. Only Marina Troy, the unmarried, shy and creatively thwarted owner of the Salthill bookstore, escapes the heartbreak of a disintegrated marriage. But she is heartbroken already, having fallen in unrequited love with Adam Berendt, the town’s charismatic and mysterious sculptor.

Berendt is the character who ties all the stories together, and he also lifts the novel above the genre of “entertainment” while, of course, keeping it entertaining. By making Berendt a Socratic figure--ugly on the outside, wise and beautiful within--a man whose life and dramatic death prods his Salthill neighbors into varying degrees of confusion and enlightenment, Oates employs a solid, if somewhat tired, device. But it is not enough for Oates to insinuate her theme.

She has to instruct us in Plato’s famous myth of the cave, in which we are all born chained to the wall and able to see only the shadows of reality, not reality itself. We must break the chains of ignorance and superstition and conventional thinking, Plato tells us, and gradually make our way to the painfully blinding light. Nor does she stop with recapitulating this old story. She has to go on to give us Berendt’s dog, named Apollodorus, after Socrates’ servant. We then get another dog named Shadow. We hear marriages being described as caves, and time after time, Oates explicitly compares Berendt to Socrates. Berendt is blind in one eye, and Oates lays on blindness as a metaphor like a drunken short-order cook with the butter, so that in Berendt’s case--and indeed with the other characters as well--he has to fight off his creator’s artifice in order to stay believably alive.

So ravenous is Oates’ imagination that she gives us pictures of her own imagination at work, thus undermining her novel as she composes it. Abigail, she tells us at one point, “is a woman floating on the surface of a now disheveled bed like a cluster of rotting water lilies on the surface of a stagnant pond.” A little more than 10 pages later, we find a comparable image in the mouth of Jared, Abigail’s predictably angry son: “As far as I’m concerned,” he blurts out, “we’re just, like, algae on a pond.” Maybe Oates means this to be a parody of her rhetorical flourishes, but her solemn attention to her style gets in the way of the comedy about herself.

Indeed, while Oates has subtitled her novel, “A Romance,” she has really created an anti-romance and an attempt at a comic novel. Marina, the beneficiary of a life-changing bequest from Adam, finds herself finishing his sculptures after his haplessly heroic death: Her favorite piece is in “the stylized shape of a creature .... The cruel tearing jaws were but the jaws of romance, made up of screws, nails, bolts, zippers.” Later Oates mercilessly satirizes Owen Cutler, the novel’s one true believer in romance. Oates writes that Owen thinks he lives in “an epoch of diminished souls and yet an epoch of thrilling public romance. The President and the Girl Intern. These were Jove and Io, inflamed by passion .... And there was the tragic romance of the Black Athlete and the Blond Beauty, his former wife and the mother of his children. All of America had thrilled to their story.”

In her portrait of Owen, Oates trusts the reader to know that she is mocking her starry-eyed character’s notions of men and women, and it works nicely. The hastily constructed ending, a caustic send-up of romantic hope, as well as a genuine note of romantic hope, is also a satisfyingly complex sentiment, though an artistic disaster. Even the novel’s epigraph--”Life devours life, but man breaks the cycle, because man has memory” (attributed to Berendt, alongside another epigraph attributed to Socrates)--mocks a certain kind of intellectual pretense. Berendt, as we soon discover, has spent his entire life trying to cover up and forget his past, and the other middle-aged adventurers are shown, with one exception, repeatedly devouring each other’s lives. It is as if Oates wants us to believe that men and women will never escape the Platonic nemesis of appetite that biological desire perpetually weaves around us.

This is a fine imaginative vision. And there are other scenes in this novel of equal fineness, like the passage in which Adam’s cremated remains are scattered in his garden or the description of Lionel waiting for his wife to fall asleep before he comes to bed as his wife tries to keep awake until he arrives. When Oates is operating on this level, her psychological truth--the novel’s raison d’tre --has an elemental clarifying force. Yet she must gratify every artistic impulse that she feels. Her characters’ blind fumblings end in disaster, or heartbreak, or confusion, all of which Oates wants to portray in merry comic style. “There came Robin limping and thudding down the stairs,” she writes in an echo of 18th century farce, as she presents a daughter finding her divorced father in the arms of a strange woman. The stylistic mimicry is already painfully forced. Oates’ description of Robin’s father and his lover is so self-consciously literary that it would wipe the smile off any reader’s face: “[t]ense as drawn bows they lay together, listening.”

Nor does Oates control her private obsessions, which have often approached the physical and sexual aspects of life with repulsion. Here the trademark extremism of her language betrays her. Sentences such as “Between them was a shared memory like a shared flap of skin” or “To kiss that mouth, Lionel often thought, was to invite hemorrhage” put something of a damper on the risible impulse.

For a comic novel, “Middle Age” lacks an essential element: comedy. As unclear as it is why all these sophisticated Salthill matrons feel drawn to Berendt’s insufferably coy utterances and--always Platonic--provocations, it’s equally unclear whether Oates means them to be obnoxious. She presents Berendt’s ideas far too seriously to let them breathe with laughter. But earnest excess is the artistic cross Oates bears.

Like life itself--to borrow from Berendt’s epigraph--Oates devours herself in some fantastic kind of self-escape. Her literary gifts devour her comic ones; her intellectual gifts devour her literary ones; her imagination devours the creatures of her imagination. What a shame for the first-rate artist buried within her, and what a shame for American literature, that Oates is unable to pull a little on the bit between her undisciplined imagination and her gigantic ambition.