I'll Take You There
Joyce Carol Oates Fourth Estate, 290pp, £10.99
ISBN 0007146442
When she was a baby, the unnamed narrator of this compelling novel killed her mother. Or so she thinks. In fact, her mother, Ida, died of cancer soon after her birth: prematurely aged from five pregnancies, which have produced three sons, Ida lingers for 18 months after her Caesarean fails to heal and her breasts develop cysts that turn, inexorably, into cancer. The father blames his daughter for what happened. As she grows up, he never kisses her, never touches or looks at her and addresses her only as "you".
Afterwards, the family moves to an isolated farm in the Snow Belt, the home of the father's parents. He increasingly absents himself (he works "in construction") but occasionally sends his family postcards, which the daughter hoards in a drawer. "He blames her, you know - the little one. For Ida dying," she hears her grandmother tell a neighbour. Her brothers hate her, for "having been born, I caused our mother's death".
A defining moment comes during her high school graduation, where she is the only student to win a state scholarship to college. Her father turns up, drunk and unannounced, and hugs her with pride. Soon after, the family learns he is dead, and has been buried somewhere in Utah. At college, she feels she is a personality "cobbled together" from bits and pieces of other people's characters. Emotionally illiterate and intellectually self-lacerating, she manufactures memories of her mother and imagines having sisters with whom she could share mittens and scarves. A poor girl, she joins the prestigious Christian (no Jews "but no Negroes either") sorority house Kappa Gamma Pi, hoping to meet the sisters she lacks. But her room-mates are an intimidating group of Sixties girls with bouffant hairstyles, armoured breasts and mouths of crimson grease; they talk to her only to get her to write their term papers. She gets an eating disorder. Her sorority housemother, the snobbish Mrs Thayer, can't even get her name right; she usually addresses her as "Mary Alice" but occasionally as "Elise", "Alicia", even "Janice".
The narrator uncovers Mrs T's secret drinking, and they are both thrown out of the house. "They would claim that I destroyed Mrs Thayer," she notes, but you could substitute the names of all the people she loves and it would be true. Later, Anellia (as she now calls herself) blames herself for the downfall of her lover, a black mature philosophy student, after she forces him to confront his ancestry and the family he deserted. Near the end of the novel, she hears that her father is alive after all, though terminally ill. She drives to Utah and finds him disfigured from operations to his throat and mouth. Forbidden to look at him, she sits with her back to his bed. As always, however, she has to learn the truth. Finding a sliver of broken mirror, she holds it up in front of her to sneak a look. Their eyes meet, perhaps for the first time in their lives, and in his distress he dies. Once again, the destruction of another comes as the price of her own existence.
We know little more, except that she becomes a writer and that, with her parents buried in a joint grave in Strykersville, she feels her "family is now complete". The novel ends with her addressing an unknown other: "If things work out between us, some day I'll take you there."
That this book is neither depressing nor dull, but full of edgy writing as well as mordant wit, testifies to the considerable talent of the prolific Joyce Carol Oates.
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