A kiss is no longer just a kiss
Anita Brookner
YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS by Joyce Carol Oates
Macmillan, £10.95
If I had had my way I should have been re-reading Elizabeth Taylor's At Mrs Lip- pincote's, but fate cast Joyce Carol Oates in my path, and after that the weekend was lost. It was Monday by the time that her 436 pages, most of them unpunctuated, had been committed to mind, and I found them impressive, although I had found her admonitory title initially importunate. She has written a novel of the Fifties, a decade of which to be thoroughly ashamed: a decade of the war in Korea, atom bomb tests, the McCarthy hearings, and awful abortions. No sordid detail of that sordid time escapes her, and this is something of a triumph. Her America is a corrective to the sunny, breezy, companionably and popu- lously domesticated world of John Updike. Joyce Carol Oates' America is small town, industrial waste, home dressmaking, dingy bars, prohibited sex, protest marches, and scholarships that permit release. It is not a comfortable place.
Enid Maria Stevick escapes from Port Oriskany, but only after a protracted love affair. This might be part of any girl's sentimental education: unfortunately, her lover is her uncle, her father's younger half-brother. Felix Stevick is a boxer, and Joyce Carol Oates' most recent obsession comes through in long accounts of fights, injuries, blood flying through the air, permanent scars, even death. Neverthe- less, Felix is seen as essentially glamorous, with his slicked-back hair and his impor- tant cars. Nobody finds out about this affair, although Enid is only 14 when it starts and it ends with an abortion. Oddly enough, it is the man who is broken up by this: he is last glimpsed in a hospital bed, having been beaten senseless by an old enemy in the washroom of a bar, while Enid is on the bus to Rochester and the Westcott School of Music.
For all its length, there is not a lot to this novel. Its 'strong' theme, and its painstak- ing evocation of a period to which every- one has a right to look back in anger, its urgent tumultuous sentences, and its over- whelming unpleasantness, do not, at first, make it a novel to remember. Yet it is good, and Joyce Carol Oates is not a negligible writer. In her last novel, Marya: A Life, she explored the world of unhappy and underprivileged childhood, and the American way out: furious upward mobil- ity, unusual intellectual endeavour, the wholly meritorious desire to succeed. Here she does something more difficult. She portrays in depth characters who are essen- tially mediocre. Enid's father at his second- hand furniture store, thinking forbidden thoughts about women other than his wife; Enid's mother, Hannah, bulky in her punishing corsets, always ready to damp down enthusiasm; Enid's dreadful married sister, Geraldine, with her show-off preg- nancies; Enid's sainted brother, Warren, a law school drop-out now wedded to the peace movement — all are graceless, un- attractive, running to fat and to words.
And yet it grips. The daily character of the Stevicks' lives gradually takes over the reader. One smells the polluted air from the chemical plant, catches the uneasiness that exists between the mute women and their jovial balked husbands, recognises the very old television programmes, the ordinariness of the house, the sisters' shared bedroom, the complete lack of any beauty, joy, altruism, refinement. And Enid and Felix, who are less interesting, make love in a way that is entirely true to such a stunted environment. Their dread- ful affair (and it is dreadful, even shameful, to read about) convinces one that in such places these things happen. It also con- vinces one that in a woman's novel sex never looks very good on the page.
What has happened in Joyce Carol Oates' lifetime, and in the span of her career, is that women are now free to write what might once have been censorable and censurable. And that the compulsion to write of such matters grows exponentially in the telling. This is what is so striking about You Must Remember This. There are few memorable sentences in the entire book, and yet the tone is painful. The interesting thing is that this tone of anger and injury may no longer be agreeable to women readers, though they will be attracted to this book, just as it will automatically be given to a woman review- er. It may just be possible to envisage a time when the confessions have to stop, although the genre is by now so well established that it is something of a model for women writers. Yet although the model is flawed, there is something courageous about it. Certainly Joyce Carol Oates has written a very courageous book, and the process cannot have been entirely comfort- able. And she has taken on a whole world of shabby behaviour and unelevated senti- ment, has, in fact, matched herself to the awful decade. It is, oddly, an heroic enterprise, casting a spell of depression and astonishment. But then she has always been a surprising writer, driven by im- pulses that might not bother a more complacent woman.
By the time I got back to Elizabeth Taylor, who wrote At Mrs Lippincote's in 1945, I was ready for a rest. And I got it. In 1953 Mrs Taylor wrote a short, modest piece for the New York Herald Tribune, which is reprinted as the introduction to the Virago Modern Classics edition. She had, characteristically, very little to say about herself. She confessed to enjoying domestic duties. 'Going off in a country bus with large shopping baskets is always an adventure'. Would any woman, could any woman, say that today? The date 1953 — is the same as the one that Joyce Carol Oates has chosen for her story. I offer both as the subject for future ex- amination questions in Women's Studies. Mark the gains and losses in the position of women as indicated in the work of these two novelists. Write on one side of the paper only. You have three hours. Begin now.
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