Lost in the macabre

In disturbing tales of isolation and brutality, Oates leaves her characters — and sometimes, her readers — adrift

September 19, 2010|Valerie Miner, Globe Correspondent

Joyce Carol Oates is a smart, bold, insightful writer, but her short stories are puzzling at best. This accomplished novelist, incisive critic, and nimble essayist often dons the cape of the Goth to write short fiction. “Sourland,’’ Oates 23d collection of stories, is by turns shadowy, cold, threatening, degrading, and brutal. The macabre narratives, including tales of vicious rape and pedophilia, are replete with graphic horror.

In the title novella, “Sourland,” newly widowed Sophie Quinn copes with the first stages of shocking loneliness. Through the mail come oddly shaped envelopes from a furtive man named Kolk in Sourland, Minn. Enticed and unnerved by the attention, she wonders what Matt, her husband, would do. “Hard not to think, the husband had abandoned her to this space. Hadn’t he promised when they’d first fallen in love , I will protect you forever dear Sophie! — in an extravagance of speech meant to be playful and amusing and yet at the same time, serious, sincere. And so — he’d abandoned her.”

Gradually, Kolk, lures Sophie to his cabin in a mountain wilderness northwest of Grand Rapids. Sophie recalls their graduate days at the University of Wisconsin, where Matt did his PhD, and Kolk, a murky politico, went underground after a bombing incident.

Sophie knows she’s in peril as she waits for Kolk to collect her at the airport, but she can’t help herself. Like many of Oates’s characters, she seems impelled by danger. “From the lower part of his face metallic-grey whiskers sprang bristling yet as he drew closer Sophie could see that the left side of his face was badly scarred, disfigured — a part of the lower jaw was missing, a double row of teeth exposed as in a ghastly fixed smile.”

Oates’s fans may be distracted by parallels here with her life and work. The recently widowed author received her master’s degree from Madison where her husband, Raymond Smith, got his PhD. Sophie is eight years younger than Matt, just as Oates is eight years younger than Smith. Oates and Smith published another book, “The Sourlands,’’ by Jana Harris, through their excellent Ontario Review Press. Sourland Mountain is actually located near Princeton, where Oates teaches.

Kolk imprisons Sophie in his cabin and assaults her in a scene described in Oates’s most purple prose, “Like some bare, smooth-skinned creature she squirmed and thrashed beneath him, she could not breathe, another time he was smothering her, his hungry-sucking mouth on hers was suffocating her.’’