When women were girls

Joyce Carol Oates, I’ll Take You There, Fourth Estate, £10.99, paperback

Does this woman ever stop?  Joyce Carol Oates has written forty books in as many years.  She has built up a tremendous momentum which carries the reader forward like a locomotive.

On television Oates comes across as a wilted blossom: Emily Dickinson’s younger sister, plaintive rather than feisty.  On the page as in this autobiographical fiction it is like following the ‘mad girl’ she was as a student forty years ago through a crowded train racketing determinedly forward.

You catch sight of characters including some notable female grotesques: powdered, powerful dowager figures like the British sorority housemother and the university’s Dean of Women: “practiced in scolding, chiding, abrading and humiliating young women”.

A bookish orphan Oates found herself out of place among the girls of the hard-partying Kappa Gamma Pi sorority house on the Syracuse University campus.

“They were fighting for their lives.  Their goal was to become engaged before graduation.”  Details are precisely observed: “The smoke curling from the sides of their mouths like exhaust from a car’s tailpipe.  Marble-hard sharpness of their eyes.”

“My Kappa sisters were fascinating to me as giant, brightly feathered predator birds would be fascinating to a small songbird hiding in the brush.”

The atmosphere of the student house is brilliantly described.  Oates is clearly not going to last there and she collapses into a breakdown.

However, she repeatedly shows her toughness.  Even the pervert with the “thin wormy mouth stretched in a leering grin” who accosts her in the snow outside gets a heavy philosophy book in the face.

This is a story of the Sixties, mostly set around the turn of the year 1962/63 and of the change of attitude of the “mutinous young women” who would eventually become feminists.

The young heroine surrenders her virginity to an “articulate” black man, Vernor Matheius, a crude posturing philosophy grad student, descendant of the Dahomey slave-kingdom, indifferent to the civil rights movement, who substitutes Wittgenstein for the Nation of Islam.

Another obsession, another hopeless search for love.  This ends badly, as it must, the unnamed Oates character being unable to keep her nose out of other people’s business and then the story veers off in a completely unexpected direction, into the West and a final shattering look in the mirror.

You are left wondering how much of it is true, how many living persons can see themselves in the story.

Excellent.  A possible classic?

Björk will have to play the lead in the movie version.

Oxford Times  24 January 2003