Review #1 of the make-up posts

Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates, reviewed by N. Vivian on March 7, 2009

Words are like bullets.

In writing, I have serious flaws that I'm working on fixing. Specifically, I write too much--this is why drabbles are so good for me. Saying everything I want to say in 100 words...I can rarely contain myself to 100 words exactly, but I do (generally) try to keep them below 1000. It is hard to write a story in 1000 words or less--at least for me. You read my reviews, you know how verbose I can be; I make a three hour tale out of a limerick. I give the set-up, then the punchline, and then go out on to explain the joke. It's not that I don't trust my audience--it's more that I don't trust myself to have told it properly. It's for that same reason that I abuse italics and adverbs. This way I know everyone will understand what I mean.

I am convinced this is one of the reasons I'm not good at poetry.

If words are like bullets, then my words are like buck shot--lots at once, that scatter so when they hit, they don't do much damage or penetrate very deeply.

Joyce Carol Oates, on the other hand, her words are jacketed hollow-tipped bullets shot from a high-powered sniper rifle. Not only does she not bother explaining the joke, half the time she'll give you maybe half the punchline (or none at all), and demand that you figure it out your own damn self. I almost felt as if the book were a race, and I had to run to keep up with her--her prose is so quick and fast that you have to pay attention or it slips right by you. Much the main character, Gillian, I felt lost and disoriented while reading, as if there was so much more going on, hovering at the edges of my senses.

I'm not saying that the book was incomprehensible. Far from it--the narrative is clear, with enough short, declarative sentences to make Hemingway proud. Though the book itself isn't completely linear, but it is symmetrical. It starts in 2001, goes to January of 1976, then to September of '75 up through Jan of '76 again, before ending back in 2001. Jaunts in time aside, it's still very easy to follow, thematically. the "lost and disoriented" feeling comes from the denseness of the text. It's not dense like Judith Butler (her prose is a mortar, nigh-overwhelming when you're hit with it), in fact, it's dense in an opposite kinda way. Butler uses big words and long sentences to get her words out point across; her text is dense because she is describing a complicated theory in a very complicated way. Neither Oates's words nor her meaning are very complicated; however, she uses few words to get that point across. Butler exercises your brain trying to figure out what she means by deciphering what she says. Oates exercises your brain by making it work to put in all the meaning that is implied by her words that she doesn't come out and say. I'm not saying she leaves stuff out, but...reading novels, we're used to having all the information we need spoon-fed to us. There's tons of description and dialogue and interaction and we have more than we actually need to know. I'm not saying that's a bad thing--I'm all over lush descriptions and the like. But it takes a mental shift to go from all that to Beasts, where we're given exactly what we need and no more. My brain had to work to give me everything she wasn't saying.

I'm tempted to give a few more analogies (one about painting, the other about food), but I won't. Either you understand me or you don't. Either way, you should read the book.

Anyway, Beasts primarily takes place on a small college campus in the Berkshires during the Fall semester of 1975. We only get brief sketches of the characters (most only described with a single aspect), but they still feel alive and vibrant. Gillian is the girl we all know--the one who does well at school to please the frigid and demanding parents at home; uptight, nervous, and repressed. Dominique is sultry, Marisa has ash-blond hair, Cassie is emotionally fragile. The main triangle of characters is Gillian, Andre, and Dorcas, so they get the most description, but even with only a few words and bits of dialogue, we know enough about them.

Gillian, a junior, is madly in love with her poetry professor Andre Harrow, just like every other student on campus. He and his scultpress wife, Dorcas, have this whole 1960's bohemian mystique about them. Her sculptures are weird and engrossing and scary and bizarre. His writing workshops can make people cry, but a single word of praise can make a semester of pain vanish in a blink. According to rumor, they occasionally take a student to be one of Dorcas's 'interns' for a bit, and that girl is swept up in their lavish and exciting lifestyle. But no one ever says for sure what happens there, or who's a part of it.

Unsurprisingly, it's a world of sex, drugs, and power. I half-expected this book to contain a supernatural element; that Andre and Dorcas use these girls to fuel crazy-ass blood rituals and call forth demons or something. I'm more disturbed that it doesn't--Andre and Dorcas just seem to enjoy using, manipulating, and exploiting young women. They probably don't even see it that way--even as they dope the young woman and take pictures of them, and send those pictures to various X-rated magazines. These girls are trauma victims and don't even know it--no, instead they go back ask for more until they spiral out of control. They're abused, emotionally kicked and petted, until they can't tell which way is up. Attention, any attention is good. I almost felt claustrophobic while reading it--there's so little but it means so much, and everything is just so...fraught.

Reading this book is like watching the heroine (the smart one, the one you don't hate) go down the basement stairs in a horror movie. You're screaming "Don't do it!" but the pull is inexorable.

I will never write like Joyce Carol Oates. She's a master artist, and the closest I could come would be weak imitation. I don't really want to write like her (I am a lush description kinda girl myself), but it's humbling to read her work anyway. She polishes each word till it gleams and then uses them to cut. It's beautiful, the way really good poetry is beautiful. This book is profoundly disturbing, and only gets moreso the more you think on it. She writes like an iceberg, and only after you put the book down and have time for reflection can you get to most of what's hidden beneath.

5 stars

In books I trust,
N. Vivian