Mother, Missing
Joyce Carol Oates Fourth Estate, 434pp, £17.99
ISBN 0007207956
Joyce Carol Oates's latest novel has two titles. Readers in the UK will find themselves opening Mother, Missing; the US edition is called Missing Mom. Although the idea that we Brits can't cope with words of one syllable might well have come from Marketing HQ, Oates's acceptance of the change shows how the overall effect of a book is, for her, more important than individual details. It is also typical of the way she adapts herself to an imagined audience. But while this is often a virtue, Oates's sweeping conception of the wider world - together with her desire to think big and write fast (this is her 50th novel) - have, in recent works, led to problems.
The story revolves around Nikki Eaton, a 31-year-old journalist from New Jersey. Attractive, but unattached, she has been "engaged and almost-engaged and in love and out of love" numerous times, much to the concern of her mother, Gwen, and her sister, Clare. The novel opens at a lunch party attended by various family members and friends. They are served a medley of her mother's speciality dishes including a "much-anticipated Hawaiian Chicken Supreme . . . asparagus spears, corn souffle, beet salad with chopped mint, home-baked raisin/yoghurt/twelve-grain bread, peach melba with ice cream and cherry-pecan kringle". A few days after this triumphant chow-down, Gwen is dead, having been stabbed numerous times with a Swiss army knife. There are no car-chase scenes or prolonged investigations; the murderer is quickly found and arrested. Instead, drive and suspense are created by describing Nikki's grief and self-hatred, and her realisation of the truth about her mother's gifts and secrets.
The novel is also about Joyce Carol Oates, whose own mother died of a stroke in 2003. In many ways, Mother, Missing is Oates's attempt to capture the balance between particulars and universals. She sets out to do this by turning her own experience of losing a parent into Gothic sensation, to "objectify" her "worst nightmare". As Nikki's grief grows she becomes more like her mother, adopting her house, her grey cat and her recipe books. The power of this domestic Gothic form, in which images of blood, flesh and dough meld, allows Oates to give more general expression to her grief.
Oates also transforms her experience by writing about loss from the point of view of a woman half her own age. The problem, however, is that she doesn't do contem-porary very well. Her characterisation of thirtysomething life in 2001 is out of key. Rebellious, stylish Nikki is wearing "spiky maroon hair" and "bold magenta lipstick" circa 1981. Her 35-year-old sister is in a "lilac polyester pants suit with a tunic top", with her hair "styled in one of those small-town-beauty-parlour-wash-and-wear-perms that fit all sizes of female heads like a Wal-Mart stretch wig". Technological advance seems to have been suspended (Nikki's police detective admirer sends her letters written on an ancient typewriter) and some period details are simply wrong (Ecstasy, apparently, didn't exist in 1990).
It's all a bit peculiar, and slightly embarrassing. More importantly, it undercuts the novel's aims. In many ways, Mother, Missing is Oates's stand for the kind of fiction that was recently, and controversially, dismissed by Toby Litt and Ali Smith as "disappointingly domestic". It is a novel that points out, and points up, the importance of the unnoticed details of women's lives. It wants us to think about the right way to make sourdough, about the way to store one's family memories, or to notice how "carefully sewn" a blue linen jacket is, with "its pale-blue silk lining". These things, Nikki gradually sees, are "woman's things, women's bodies", so crucial to women's identity but of "little consequence" to the local cop. By failing in her own details, Oates unravels the very thing she is writing about - the beauty, economy and gravity of what is seen to be small.
In the end, Oates's venture into mother-daughter fiction is a brave one; yet in comparison to a novel such as Carol Shields's Unless, it feels half-baked. This is a shame, because the premises that underpin the novel are powerful. Oates is suggesting not only the ways we miss those we love after death, but the ways we misunderstand them when they are alive. As Nikki begins to mourn, she also begins to realise the value of the details of her mother's life, not only for their own sake but for the pain and sorrow these details concealed. And with this comes the longing for the lost ideal mother - or, to be particular, the ideal "mom"; a longing for someone America might come home to.
Sophie Ratcliffe is research fellow and tutor in English at Keble College, Oxford
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