Heat, and other stories (1991)
Joyce Carol Oates (1938)
397 pages
Joyce Carol Oates leads her characters — and readers — onto dangerous and uncertain ground in her unsettling collection Heat, and other stories. The perilous situations into which she places her characters bring to the surface their deepest, most hidden insecurities and fears. As readers we squirm uncomfortably, wondering whether our own carefully suppressed idiosyncrasies could suddenly be exposed by similar cruel and unexpected twists of fate.The twenty-five stories included in the book have been divided into three groups, labeled simply I, II and III. Though the stories share similar structures and themes, distinctions between the three sections do become apparent.
The first group of eight tend to center on individuals who stumble into situations — from deeply unsettling to physically dangerous — that reveal a tenuous grip on their lives, emotionally and psychologically. In the face of unexpected events, the appearance of strength and control they normally maintain for the world dissolves, and despite often having some inkling of what they could or should do, in the moment they find themselves unable to muster the will to avoid falling into destructive behaviors.
In The Boyfriend, a woman out to the bar with friends is approached by a man with a connection to her ex-boyfriend that she can’t quite recall; without much thought, she leaves the bar with him for drinks and dinner, and eventually ends up with him back her place, where she suddenly realizes she’s in over her head. Naked opens as a pack of children set upon a woman hiking alone in a suburban wildlife preserve, beating her and stripping her naked before disappearing as suddenly as they had appeared; concerned initially only with survival, as she struggles to reach safety thoughts about how being found naked could have implications to her reputation and place in her community begin to weigh ever more heavily on her.
The second group of twelve stories are not that dissimilar in theme from the first, but develop instead around two or three characters who come together in a morass of misunderstanding so fundamental that a complete and utter breakdown lies inevitably, if somehow completely unrecognized, before them.
The title story, Heat, opens this section, and provides a consummate example of Oates’ style in all the stories of this collection. In it we learn already in the opening few paragraphs that eleven year old twin sisters will be abused and die at the hands of a nineteen year old boy with the cognitive level of a six year old. The art of the story lies not in building the action to a climax, but rather in Oates’ ominous, and oppressively gradual release of details, physical and psychological. In Leila Lee, a young woman realizes already in the opening lines that she has married badly; as her attempts to build a connection to her husband’s diffident teenage son only serve to highlight her own desperate situation in the marriage.
The final set of five stories have a supernatural bent: ghost stories of a kind, or dystopian, nightmarish situations. A future fraught with economic and environmental collapse leads to a radical re-definition of familial relationships and dynamics in Family. In Ladies and Gentlemen:, a group of retires on a cruise ship in the South Pacific discover the horrifying truth behind their children having gifted them the trip.
In many of the stories the characters struggle through their lives with a deep unease they can’t — or don’t want to — confront or identify; it flits just outside their consciousness. The hopes and dreams of their youth have given way to the discovery that they have made compromises and mistakes, and in the process have constructed lives fraught with psychological trip wires, leaving them ever on the verge of careening out of control. Ultimately the result is a rashness of behavior that compromises their ability to react thoughtfully at critical moments.
In these stories Oates provides no tidy solutions. She generally reveals already at the beginning how a particular story will proceed, if not end, and wraps them up just as the climax in the action has occurred. Thus, many of the stories open with a quick descent into crisis, but then end without a full resolution; not unlike real life, the ultimate outcome remains uncertain, with the characters themselves having little idea what the future might hold. As her characters get caught up in events that shatter their carefully constructed worlds: what point, Oates seems to imply, in imagining how they might eventually pick up the pieces?
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