The lies that blind

NO living American writer is more skilled at showing the human heart in conflict with itself than Joyce Carol Oates. However gifted at plot development and the use of motifs and thematic clues to provide psychological and emotional depth, Oates is, finally, a writer of moral fiction. She often writes about costs and responsibility. In her work there is always a culprit or a set of culprits responsible for those costs, which are forever high. A death or the destruction of a career can result because of a mistake made by someone else. Though profoundly aware that we are often most human in the middle of misunderstanding others, Oates is also telling us that so many of our most haunting tragedies are rooted in wrong judgments. What makes her particularly important to our time is how she brings those technical skills and that overview to the most demanding frontline of our era and the epic quality of its errors based in liberal or conservative stereotypes. These received ideas are supposed to explain ethnic behavior, family, history, society and themselves.

Oates has long avoided the dominant tendency that results in American writers knowing much about their backyards but little about their neighborhoods, cities or states, and even less about those outside their ethnic groups. That is why “Black Girl/White Girl” is such a marvel and moves the very enterprise of contemporary fiction far beyond the well-worn subject of self-obsession. Oates writes from the frontier of integration, where race is all but tells us so much less than we might assume, imply or assert.

“Black Girl/White Girl” is the third novel in which Oates plays variations on the psychologically complex themes of interwoven class and ethnic conflict. The situation is familiar: During the 1970s, a young female freshman struggles with the deceptive layers of trouble arriving in black and white terms that mystify, disturb and frustrate her. One is startled by how Oates achieves even greater depths of human understanding than she did in the previous “I’ll Take You There” from 2002, both a blue masterwork and an extraordinary advance over the first in this series, 1990’s “Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart.”

The narrator/main female character makes good and bad decisions in response to surroundings where rational and lunatic modes of address become ritualistic: White and black people relate to each other while playing all manner of games and wearing all manner of masks. Yet Oates finds human parallels, no matter how far apart her people might be on the social or the color scale. That is the fundamental strength of literary art, and Oates knows, without a doubt, that there is always a human heart beneath the surfaces, and it usually beats frantically or in stunned slow motion.

In making this concealed humanity apparent, the novelist outdoes almost all American writers in her imaginatively ordered structures of revelation. Techniques are borrowed from the detective story; with a virtuosic sense of placement, she provides clues through outbursts in which suppressed thoughts and feelings appear and surprise the teller as much as they do the listener. Her varieties of precision allow for distinct tonal and rhythmic differences if the sudden blurtings take place in public or in private. One can spark anger and embarrassment, the other empathy.

Oates masterfully uses a patient tempo to make everything seemingly clear but not didactic. The middle-aged narrator tells us about herself when she was a white girl living with a black girl during their freshman year at a liberal arts college founded by Quakers. Though the white girl is so ashamed of her privileges that she hides the fact of being heir to Quaker millions, and though the black girl has been reared as the spoiled, self-centered daughter of a minister, they are very similar. Both girls feel alienated from their surroundings and equally intimidated by their classmates, no matter how differently they express their fears or how hard they try to protect themselves.

The white girl pretends to be just another freshman strapped for money, and she brown-noses with a nearly selfless determination much of the time. The black girl trembles behind a blowfish exterior of condescending bitchiness that intensifies as her dorm mates -- black and white -- lose patience with her and slowly begin to hate the young woman for her apparent sense of superiority, if not a defiantly unquestionable feeling of personal perfection.

That they are completely wrong is what so many of the characters in the novel have in common: They misconstrue the motivations of others because every mistake is so much easier to make when marinated in stereotypes that decisively limit accurate perception. The girls in the dorm do not think that color provides a good enough excuse for studied rudeness and disdain, but they cannot comprehend the fear blocked from sight by the nose of a snooty minister’s daughter that rises ever higher in the air as the pressure becomes greater. The white girl accepts every slight from her self-involved roommate, patiently hoping she will be liked at some later date. She eventually deduces that the black girl got high grades in second-rate public schools that did not provide sufficient sophistication or the skill to do first-rate college work.

When the desperately prideful black girl realizes how poorly prepared public school has left her, the choice is made to retreat into herself, into her Bible, and to consume so much food that her weight balloons until she covers the protective and self-disgusting armor of fat with a hooded overcoat that makes her appear ominous to white storekeepers. Hiding a feeling of defeat, the minister’s daughter smugly accepts all of the gushing sympathy that appears when she becomes the target of racist actions and notes.

Oates depicts the interaction between the white shopkeepers and the black girl with superior insight, and the writer maintains this in showing the clumsiness with which the girls, teachers and college administrators respond to the stubbornly mysterious presence of assumed racism among them. As one would expect of Oates, the racist actions and the bigoted notes mask a much greater complexity, which rises through the narrative with admirable pacing and a degree of deep concern for the bewildering heartbreak that always, somehow, attends integration.

Oates also peels back the covers on the radical-chic family of her narrator, headed by a wealthy lawyer given to liberal condescension and a mother who has been taken in by the decadence, the psychobabble and the drugs of the 1960s. Not since Danzy Senna’s innovatively comprehensive “Caucasia” has anyone done an equally powerful analysis of such people and the harsh dangers of the fire with which they played as the high-mindedness of the civil rights movement gave way to a heartlessly romantic sense of “revolutionary” action.

One of the reasons this novel stands so tall is that Oates makes the well-intentioned villains as sympathetic, frail and naive as everyone else. For all their human qualities, neither the lawyer nor his wife manage to avoid the disgust the narrator has for their irresponsible support of too many dangerous radicals. Oates does not ask the reader to forgive the husband and wife, which would be immoral, but her writing demands that we not fail to recognize their humanity, because dehumanizing them would be an even greater act of immorality. Ignorance of the consequences, the writer tells us in no uncertain terms, is not an excuse but a complicating aspect of our ethnic tragedy.

At the end, the narrator must face the love that she still feels for those she has failed and betrayed. Paced by a terrible campus fire and the fall of a powerful man, the close-ups, flashbacks, foreshadowings and counterpointing of the narrative become particularly effective in the last 100 pages. Everything that seemed extraneous before is realized, adding human and thematic resonance.

The grandeur of the achievement cannot be overstated. Few American writers have the necessary spunk and technique to bring a world of more than one ethnic type alive: Even fewer understand the tremulous souls hidden by meaningless class and even more meaningless color. Only those with the biggest hearts have the nerve to enter that bruising frontier of the national life, integration, where nothing is actually what it seems, and no one has a heart bigger, braver or more full of unsentimental pity than Joyce Carol Oates. *