Murder She Wrote (2006)

seems to me, Joyce Carol Oates wrote in New Heaven, New Earth, the great works of literature deal with the human soul caught in the stampede of time, unable to gauge the profundity of what passes over it, like the characters of Yeats who live through terrifying events but who cannot understand them. In this way, she insists, passes over most of us. Most, but not all. A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America. And in this, her twentieth novel, Oates has taken on what Du Bois averred would be the defining problem of this century. Du Bois called it the line, but here it is figured as a wound, crusted with proud flesh and humbled spirits. The novel is set in a small town in western New York from the early 1950s to the early 1960s, and follows the declining fortunes of two families, one white (the Courtneys) and one black (the Fairchilds). When Jinx Fairchild, at 16, gets in a fight with a white kid who has menaced Iris Courtney, 14, and ends up killing him, the secret they share is, of course, both a bond and a barrier between the two. This kind of precis could make the novel sound tidily schematic, yet it's anything but. The real spine of the book may be its brilliant depiction of downward mobility, the painful fragility of the Courtneys' standing in the world (they're lower-middle-class and sinking fast). As we discover, the color line means something different when you are poor than it does when you are rich. Oates renders the lineaments of racial resentment with precision; I'd add that her ear is unfailing across gradations of class and color, if it didn't seem like praising Heifetz for playing in tune. Oates has always been able to create a living, breathing character within a few sentences, and she's prodigal with that talent. Like the proverbial cabinetmaker who lovingly finishes a surface that nobody will ever see, Oates gives minor characters carefully limned personalities and histories where an impressionistic blur might have sufficed. The effect is wasteful and rich, akin to the photographic technique of deep focus. What's curious is that Oates writes as if each novel is her first, last and only one, a singular testament to her existence; at times we feel that she has put everything she knows into a single page, each a cunning medley of pit and wit. If that's a trick, it's not the only one up her sleeve. There is, too, the canny modulation between different points of view, which makes it impossible to distinguish indirect discourse from interstitial narrative. In Oates's craft, the boundaries of character are so porous as to subsume everything else. But her basic technique is really quite simple: Find just where it hurts and then press, hard. Because It is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart is less a novel about public history than one about private memory, the narratives by which we fashion our lives. And if the book traces the gradual disintegration of Iris's genteel and self-deceived mother, Persia, it also charts Iris's escape from her past. At university, where she excels, she is taken up by her art history professor and his wealthy family. But who she is proves a matter of what others will make of her. For Gwendolyn Savage, the professor's wife, Iris replaces the daughter who failed her. Gwendolyn introduces Iris to her son, Alan, and she will become his fiancee. Still, as Iris dimly realizes, it's not exactly Alan Savage she loves but Savages, and to become a Savage she will revise her family history in a dozen trivial ways. (Her mother was no longer a cocktail waitress who drank herself into the grave; she was now a sort of distressed gentlewoman who had to support her family on the income of a librarian's assistant, and tried to the very end to shield her daughter from the extent of her suffering.) For his part, Alan, too, has submitted his life to a brutal rewrite, briskly severing relations with his male lover in Paris (this rendered in a beautifully elided scene of less than a page). …