Mirage-Seekers
THEM by Vanguard, $6.95
Them, the final volume of Joyce Carol Oates’s trilogy about life at various cultural and social levels in the United States, is intricate, alarming, a total success.
A Garden of Earthly Delights, the first volume, chronicled the migrant worker and one woman’s overpowering drive to rise above her doomed class.Expensive People investigated the superrich, the pursuit of something intangible in a world of tangible meaningless wealth. Them explores the classes in between, the lower middle class particularly, swallowed by a mechanized society.
It is the history of Loretta Botsford and her children, Jules and Maureen, beginning during the Depression with the murder of Loretta’s lover as he lies beside her in bed and closing with the Detroit riots of 1967. At sixteen, Loretta, who lives “in an eternity of flesh,”marries Howard Wendall, the policeman who had found her murdered lover. She leaves her drunken father and her brother Brock, who committed the murder for the simple reason that he was born to be a killer, and she moves into an emotionless Eden of raising her babies, gossiping, going to the movies. This will never end, should never end, she thinks. But then Howard is fired for involvement in a prostitution ring, and they move to the country with their children, their disgrace, and with Mama Wendall.
Loretta’s life becomes at once tedious and tenor-ridden. There is no one to share her gossip, no one to appreciate her voice of indignation or of sympathetic anger switched on to make her life interesting and endurable for herself and her city friends. And within or behind the tedium there looms the awful presence of Mama Wendall. When Howard is drafted and sent to Europe, Loretta flees this shrewd and domineering woman and takes her children to Detroit, where on her second day in the city she is arrested for propositioning a plainclothesman. This is her return to civilization.
But in Detroit Loretta finds life repeating itself. Howard returns from Europe—he is the kind of man nobody ever kills—and sometimes works but always drinks. Her life, exactly like the lives of her neighbors and friends, has been burdened by too many children, too much work, too little enjoyment, and at its end she is just what she has been throughout it: loud, hopeful, eager for something to laugh at, undefeated only because she has never known the terms of the battle.
Maureen and Jules, so different from their mother, are in fact mirror images of her. Aspiring to rise above the pettiness and stinginess of their lives, they remain victims of their society. Both see money as the key to power and power as the key to escape; both are betrayed by their vision.
Them clearly and completely reveals the minds of people whose reactions and aspirations are dictated by a machine-oriented culture of radio, film, television. Thus robbed of imagination and genuine emotion they are condemned to the death of faith and the death of love. Religion becomes merely another description of one’s background: where he is from, who his uncle was. Love cannot even be learned: “There is no time for love to rise in her; she does not know how to work it up, cultivate it, she’s heard too much about it from her mother and other girls and from the movies.” Their culture has produced people who are not unfeeling, not unconcerned; but their feelings are made in Hollywood and their major concern is for something stable.
Very near the end of the novel Jules crosses the street near a broken-down building which houses the “Students’ Revolt Against the War in Vietnam,” and the narrator tells us that “in their front room a few days ago one of their people had been killed, an organizer shot to death. An angry cab driver had run in and shot him in the chest. Dead. The cab driver told newspaper reporters that me had a son in Vietnam and was proud.”
In a novel of over five hundred pages, this is the only mention of the house, the organizer, the cabdriver. But it is typical of Joyce Carol Oates’s vision. She sees contemporary America as a country in which the improbable, the chaotically and violently improbable, constantly reroutes purposeful lives and sometimes destroys them. John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King: their murders are only paradigms for a language of random destruction.
Them is written in the fluid, refined style that characterizes everything by Joyce Carol Oates. But this novel has a more elaborate and more symmetrical structure than any of her previous works. It is a study in surfaces because the characters know only the surfaces of their lives; the painful core of their experience never reaches them as being what their lives are about. They see only the flesh, the face in the mirror, the shifting image on the television screen, and these become the radical metaphors of the novel. But they are more than metaphors; they localize and define the characters themselves. The sixteen-yearold Loretta combing her hair before the mirror becomes the twenty-sixyear-old Maureen; the mother’s attempt at prostitution becomes the daughter’s success. The LorettaBrock relationship becomes the Jules-Maureen relationship, and Brock the murderer becomes Jules. The characters, so very unalike, beneath their surfaces are the same. The mother is the daughter, and all their lives are only random segments of a blind social continuum. They are them—those nameless others. And, by implication, so are we.
Taken together, the three books in Miss Oates’s trilogy are insightful, tragic, and finally illuminating. If there is a certain slackness in the third volume, it is because the author has put everything in: the sloppy apartments with their endless catalogue of rags and mops and coffee tins and tissues and bread crusts, the banal conversations of women whose dreams are purchased at the hairdresser’s, the smells and tastes of violence. And if now and again dialogue slips from conversation to exhortation, it is because in so large a book directions are easily lost.
Them is a history, I have said. History, not story, because we come to see not only who these pitiable people are and how they became that way, but also the social and psychological pressures which afforded them little opportunity to be anything else. And we see beyond them the unpredictable violence that threatens at every moment to enter and engulf their lives. Set in the foreground of wars, assassinations, violent and inevitable death, Them coldly calibrates the moral irresponsibility of two generations. It is an extraordinary and frightening work.