Hatred breeds a strange intimacy

Hate and love always teeter on a knife’s edge in Joyce Carol Oates’ fiction, and never more than in her latest novel, “The Tattooed Girl.” The title character, Alma Busch, has personal reasons for feeling these emotions, but she has also breathed in -- along with the poisonous air of her hometown in western Pennsylvania, where underground fires have raged in coal mines for decades -- the worldview of the anti-Semite.

“I am an American and a child of Hell,” Alma thinks. She reflexively hates the “Jew banker-owners” of the mines, who must be profiting somehow from her people’s lung diseases and poverty. But her anti-Semitism remains mostly latent until she wanders up to Rochester, N.Y., in her mid-20s and is spotted by a “predator,” Dmitri Meatte, a waiter who has also been a drug dealer and a pimp.

Dmitri views soft-faced, big-breasted Alma as doughy and malleable. This impression is reinforced by the amateur tattoos that disfigure her face and hands, work done by so-called friends when she was high on crystal meth. He speaks kindly to her, beats her, then sends her to turn tricks in cheap motels. She falls in love with him, though she hates him too. A more virulent sort of anti-Semite, Dmitri suggests to Alma that the Holocaust might have been a hoax -- and a suggestion, from him, is enough. She agrees.

Meanwhile, Joshua Seigl, a Jewish writer who has a degenerative nerve disease, is seeking to hire a live-in assistant. Independently wealthy and not yet 40, Joshua has kept the world at a remove, living alone in one of Rochester’s old river-bluff mansions. His fame -- mainly for a Holocaust novel, “The Shadows,” in which he imagined the experiences of his doomed grandparents -- fills him with unease; it’s based, he now feels, on a kind of fraud. How could anyone who wasn’t there dare to claim any insight into such things? He is reluctant to share his life by marrying a colleague who loves him. To share it with a stranger is unthinkable -- yet necessary as he grows weaker.

Joshua’s basic decency wars with his arrogant, aloof side as he rejects several well-qualified applicants, then hires the uneducated Alma on a whim. This sets up the first of the novel’s triangles. Alma is torn between Joshua and Dmitri -- between her direct experience with a Jew and how she has been taught to see Jews in general. She gives Dmitri valuables she steals from Joshua, says publicly that she’ll kill the Jew and tries to put ground glass in his food, yet she teeters.

“[T]he Tattooed Girl was the first to concede her weakness for adoring any man who refrained from kicking her in the gut, as she adored any man who did kick her in the gut ... out of a craven need to adore any man.”

A second triangle is created by the arrival of Joshua’s unstable, possessive older sister, Jet, who insists she can nurse Joshua and be his literary executor much better than Alma can. Jet attacks the Tattooed Girl, and Joshua sends his sister away for reasons he can’t quite fathom. Alma’s increasing outspokenness -- on the subjects of Holocaust revisionism and the “lies” that fiction writers tell -- pull her and Joshua into a strange intimacy. Both are shocked by what they learn. Suppose Joshua isn’t really Jewish? And suppose his grandparents really were “shadows” in the sense that his novel, courting public approval, misrepresented what they were?

Oates writes “The Tattooed Girl” in a variety of styles, most of them ugly. When she renders Joshua’s consciousness, her prose is clotted, intellectualized, ungainly; when she renders Alma’s, it’s slapdash, unpunctuated. This is surely by design. For when she wants the novel to move, it moves -- usually when her characters are in the grip of inspiration or dementia; for instance, when Joshua, in temporary remission from his disease, feels a manic grandiosity.

The style, in other words, suits the subject matter. Oates is a Gothic writer; she has long eschewed subtlety for, in Alma’s phrase, kicks in the gut. She has given us heroines like Alma before -- notably in “them” and “Man Crazy”: women who descend into pits of degradation and emerge seemingly untouched and capable of love, though not exactly normal. Teetering as they are, they can be set wrong -- or right -- with a single touch.