Joyce Carol Oates comes off as humorless most of the time. Not that I expect her tales of rape, hauntings, violence, isolation, infidelity, and despair to be lighthearted. But just as I expect any good humor writing to depict a kind of pain, I expect depictions of pain to have their own sense of humor. From my little worldview, it's part of being an honest writer.
In fact, right before reading JCO's sprawling epic A Bloodsmoor Romance, I told a friend that I liked everything about her books except that they were all so humorless.
Do you see where this is going, readers? Right after I made this judgment, I read a book by Joyce Carol Oates which was tragic, tangled, and consistently funny. OH, THE IRONY!
The unnamed narrator, a virgin, tries to keep her Victorian sense of propriety and decency as she details the lurid dissolution and reunion of an upper-class Pennsylvania family. She makes a great show of defending "proper Christian" conduct, then goes into painstaking detail about the unseemly events that bring the Zinn family into a new century.
There are infidelities, sex changes, ghosts, murders, meltdowns, spies, elopements, betrayals and abandonments, all tragic in their own way. All surreal and haunting. Cumulatively, however, in the voice of their virginal, self-righteous narrator, they make for a rollicking, jeering epic of a novel.
So I was wrong about JCO. In fact, I wonder if the same dark humor that infuses and carries A Bloodsmoor Romance isn't present in her other work as well. Maybe, like the narrator, I missed certain undertones and ironies in my rush to criticize.
Either way, A Bloodsmoor Romance joins the ranks of full-hearted epics like Infinite Jest, Catch-22, and Lolita that manage to elicit laughter, even as they batter and dissolve the relationships and spirits of their main characters.
So, I'm sure it offers Ms. Oates no small amount of relief to know that I no longer find her work humorless. In fact, Joyce, I salute you. You can be a very funny lady if you put your mind to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment