Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Book Review: "Give Me Your Heart" by Joyce Carol Oates

Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense (2010)
Joyce Carol Oates (1938-)










260 pages


Stands of lilac growing wild. That rich smothering smell, there’s a kind of madness in it.

These lines from the story “Smoother,” one of ten in Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense, a recent collection from Joyce Carol Oates, could serve as an epigraph to the book. In each of the stories a slow but inexorable madness grows to overwhelm a character: for some, transgressions thought to be firmly buried in the past re-surface suddenly, shattering their veneer of normalcy; for others a pitiless life and hopeless future weighs on their sanity, stripping them of the strength to avoid on-coming disaster. Oates paints dark visions of grim lives in these stories, the main characters fighting losing battles against their inner demons as they try to maintain the charade of a stable life for the family, friends, neighbors and themselves.

In the title story of the collection, a psychiatrist receives a letter from a past patient with whom he had become far too close, and who now demands a part of him that she feels to be her just due. The girl at the center of the story ‘Strip Poker’ joins some older boys for a boat ride across a lake, trying to escape the frustrations of her young teenage life and her scolding mother, only to find events reeling out of her control in a secluded beach house. In ‘The Spill,’ the second wife of a taciturn husband struggles to care for a houseful of children, including a young nephew of her husband whose ‘mental age … seemed to oscillate wildly;’ when she becomes pregnant again, the weight of her responsibilities finally becomes too much for her to contain.

For the most part in these stores the physical violence is only implied, anticipated, or at most described at some distance of time and place from its actual occurrence. Oates instead confronts us with more of a psychological violence, trading the temporary shock of gore for a disquiet of the mind that can haunt the reader even after the book is finished and set aside. We inhabit the minds of the characters, squirming ourselves as we watch them twist and bend in the face of situations that spiral out of their control --- that, often, they allow to spiral out of their control --- as they stagger forward, powerless to escape the seductive pull of the abyss they long for even as they may dimly recognize its danger. The suspense in these stories often builds slowly, but gradually reaches a frantic sprint that will have you pushing to reach the climax even as you try to slow down and savor Oates’ beautiful writing.


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