Joyce Carol Oates excels at writing stories of psychological suspense which also contain an underlying layer of more profound and unanswerable questions. In “Cardiff, by the Sea”, her new collection of four novellas, she presents several differently compelling and inventive strategies for teasing the reader into questioning what's real and what's only a part of the narrator's imagination. In the title story, an emotionally-charged terrifying childhood memory haunts a scholarly young woman. In “Miao Dao”, a stray cat becomes a kind of ghost guardian for a vulnerable teenage girl. A bright young student falls prey to her influential mentors in “Phantomwise:1972”. And, in “The Surviving Child”, a new wife joins a household haunted by the memory of a mother who tried to eviscerate her family. These are innately dramatic situations whose psychological complexity is furthered by the longer amount of space the author allows for them to be told, but the stories remain compact enough for their tension to remain breathtakingly persistent. Recent books of short stories by Oates such as “Pursuit” and “Night-Gaunts” present similarly suspenseful situations, but it's interesting how the author works in this new book with slightly longer forms of narrative to produce an effect that is very reminiscent of Henry James' “The Turn of the Screw.”
Two of the funniest and most vivid characters in this collection are Elspeth and Morag who are the great-aunts of Clare, the protagonist of “Cardiff, by the Sea”. Clare travels to Maine after being informed that a grandmother she didn't know existed has left her a house in her will and the aunts take her into their home while the estate is being settled. The dialogue between the two aunts whips across the page as they relentlessly bicker and fuss over Clare who is caught helplessly between them. They're like an elderly female version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee from Lewis Carroll's “Through the Looking-Glass”. In fact, a more explicit reference to “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” comes in “Phantomwise:1972” where the student protagonist is named Alyce. She becomes the assistant and romantic interest/carer of Roland B___, a famous poet who remarks that he once met the original Alice who inspired Carroll. It's delightful to see how Carroll's writing continues to inspire and reconfigure itself within Oates' fiction.
I often remark how Oates' writing almost feels prescient given that her subjects frequently mirror the most topical debates occurring at the time of her book's publication. Here again, Oates' sensitivity for the questions dividing current politics inform her storylines. A pointed message is made in the novella “Phantomwise:1972” which, significantly, is set in the time immediately before the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision on Roe v. Wade. Given the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death and her proposed replacement, the topic of abortion has come to the forefront of American politics again. Of course, this is an issue Oates has written about numerous times before, most notably in her tremendous novel “A Book of American Martyrs”. But, in this new novella, Oates considers the point of view of a young woman who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant and encounters a crisis because she's not able to legally obtain an abortion. The story serves as a stark reminder at this crucial period of time that vulnerable young individuals will face innumerable challenges if these laws are overturned.
The opening of Oates' 2007 novel “The Gravedigger's Daughter” included a scene where a parent comes close to killing everyone in his family before committing suicide. This tragic circumstance occurs again but in very different contexts in two of the novellas in this collection “Cardiff, by the Sea” and “The Surviving Child”. In returning to the region of her birth family, Clare discovers her father might have executed her mother and siblings when she was very young but there's a compelling mystery throughout the story about whether this was in fact what happened. In “The Surviving Child” Elisabeth marries a widower whose first wife Nicola was a famous poet that is posthumously accused of killing herself and her daughter. The son Stefan narrowly survived this harrowing incident and continues to live with his father and new stepmother in the upmarket house where this tragedy occurred. Elisabeth's experiences living in this solemn estate are extremely eerie and tense in way that resembles Daphne du Maurier's “Rebecca”. It's fascinating how Oates reconfigures instances of filicide in her fiction to give very different slants and perspectives on this almost unspeakable crime to show the multitude of societal pressures and psychological derangements which might motivate them.
What brings all these gripping novellas to life is Oates' masterful use of description and pace to evoke visceral feelings of dread in the reader's imagination. In the large unsettling house Elisabeth inhabits it's remarked “Doorknobs feel uncomfortably warm when touched, like inner organs.” The squirming discomfort and unsettling atmosphere these metaphors and figurative language cause make these compulsive stories darkly pleasurable to read. Equally, Oates uses creepy imagery such as a spider web to invoke a mood but also to suggest deeper meaning. In the title novella it's asked “But why are you walking away? Is this not the intersection with another? Another life, whose web you have blundered into.” Here the recurring image prompts a feeling for how our lives are made up of innumerable paths and possibilities, but we are simultaneously trapped in our circumstances. In this way, Oates ingeniously builds stories which are both thrilling and prompt deeper questions about the mysteries of existence.
You can also watch me interview Joyce Carol Oates about this collection here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGJlsLdSd28
