Fiction: Genuine terror informs the wise and often brutal vision of US storyteller Joyce Carol Oates, who has written so many books that her several publishers increasingly seldom list them and have instead taken to referring to her "numerous works of fiction".
Her productivity is relentless, so much so that it has become too easy to note the arrival of another new book by her with an unintentionally dismissive "here we go again". Constant with Oates though, is that for all the relentlessness, the tide of words, her grasp of overwhelming truths makes it impossible to ignore her dark, edgy fictions.
Since the publication of her first book, a novel, With Shuddering Fall, in 1964, Oates has looked at human behaviour in her country with spiralling measures of horror so intense that she succeeds in avoiding polemic. It was she who wrote about Chappaquiddick from the victim's viewpoint in Black Water (1992). More recently, she examined Marilyn Monroe's iconic mythology in the Pulitzer Prize finalist, Blonde (2000).
Oates's terrain is the female experience, specifically in relation to men and the dynamics of male/female power shifts. She also possesses an astute sense of history and of family, both of which she employs to staggering effect in novels such as You Must Remember This (1987), American Appetites (1989), We Were The Mulvaneys (1996) and Broke Heart Blues (1999). Most brilliantly - and shockingly - in I'll Take You There (2002), Oates charted the calculated rise of the angry outsider US college girl whose rage and resentments fester.
Injustice, most particularly female sexual injustice, has become Oates's enduring thesis. It is this, along with her understanding of psychotic hurts and grievances that render her fiction so believable. Added to this is the balletic grace of her meticulous, dignified prose. True, humour is scarce; she compels more than she entertains, although Broke Heart Blues has moments of lightness. Oates writes about extreme emotion, the hatreds women can generate and suffer. There is clarity and exactness; precision, unbearable pain and hysteria. Violence, psychological and physical, is recurring. Oates is daring. She can be subtle as well as explicit and graphic, menacing as well as heartbreakingly humane. In The Tattooed Girl (2004) she explored the culminative destruction done to the eponymous central character through years of humiliation and need.
Even at her most outraged, Oates avoids the interjection of knowing authorial asides. Much of her genius lies in her absolute control of the narrative voice -writing in either the first or third person, she convinces.
In Rape - A Love Story, the narrative moves between her familiar, urgent third person voice and a stark second person addressed to and on behalf of a young girl who has witnessed the vicious gang raping of her mother. The narrative, little more than a novella, is yet another, often horrifying, unrelenting example of exactly how good, how fluent the best of Joyce Carol Oates can be.
"After she was gang-raped, kicked and beaten and left to die on the floor of the filthy boathouse at Rocky Point Park," opens the story of Teena Maguire. "After she was dragged into the boathouse by the five drunken guys - unless there were six, or seven - and her 12-year-old daughter with her screaming Let us go! Don't hurt us! Please don't hurt us! After she'd been chased by the guys like a pack of wild dogs jumping their prey . . . After she'd begged them to leave her daughter alone and they'd laughed at her . . ." The ordeal is described with all the detail of a police report. But the woman and her child must live with the aftermath.
Acting as a prelude to the horror is the account of a mother and daughter choosing to walk home together through the park after a July 4th party. They could have stayed the night, but Teena decided to walk home and enjoy the moonlight. It is a decision she almost does not survive to regret. Teena is a 35-year-old widow, a bit flirty and a natural optimist. She tries to make the most of life and pays for it. On having managed to survive the pulverising rape and attack which almost killed her, she then must endure the humiliation of becoming the accused.
Oates confronts the fear that every rape victim faces; along with the shame of the memory, there is the cynical judgment of others, those who invariably decide the rape victim was "asking for it". Here is the crucial point at which Oates risks becoming a mere polemicist. Yet the story survives as one woman's personal hell and pubic humiliation. Only this time, there are two victims; the young daughter, Bethel, is both witness and victim.
Speaking to and on behalf of the child, the narrative voice reports with an eerie immediacy: "Wedged in a corner of the boathouse. Behind, partially beneath stacked upside-down canoes. You'd crawled desperate to escape. On your stomach, on raw-scraped elbows. Dragging yourself like a wounded snake. As one of them kicked you. Cursed you kicking your back, your thighs, your legs as if he wanted to break all your bones in his fury . . . In terror of what they were doing to your mother. What you would have to endure, hearing." The attack becomes cinematic such is the force of the imagined recreation.
Even more repulsive however is the courtroom hearing in which the victim's nervous female counsel, Diebenkorn, acting for the State against the attackers, who have become merely the alleged, is humiliated by the judge. The young thugs sit in a row, safe behind the dishonest rhetoric of their defence attorney who proceeds to demolish Teena's character.
The narrative seethes with rage; it is about this rape, and all rapes, without losing the personal. Oates enters the minds of all parties, from that of the recovering Teena as she slowly becomes aware of what has happened to that of the traumatised daughter who drifts into secrecy - "Blankly you stared at Diebenkorn. You had a new habit of going empty-eyes and uncomprehending when it suited you" - and most convincingly into the righteous pathology of the rapists who quickly begin to believe the lies cooked up by their expensive attorney.
All of this is juxtaposed with the deliberate vengeance planned by a soldier-turned-policeman who lives by the code of "an eye for an eye". His detached involvement in the outrage and subsequent actions are in keeping with Oates's daring.
Characterisation throughout is sharp and convincing; in inventing her characters, she becomes them. "Irma Pick believed fiercely that her sons were innocent, but Walt guessed they were as guilty as hell." At times the second person narrative, as addressed to the young girl, echoes that of Jeffrey Eugenides's superlative use of a chorus-like recitative in The Virgin Suicides (1993). So much anger, so much feeling, so many truths, Rape - a Love Story in which a tramautised child seeks a hero at a time of terror, demonstrates not only the passion, pathos and psychological intensity of this most explosive of major, if unsung, US writers, but also again showcases her full-blooded, soaring prose.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Rape - A Love Story By Joyce Carol Oates Atlantic Books, 154pp. £9.99
