Grave affair

Oates' compelling novel digs up somber themes buried in past

Jenny Shank, Special to The Rocky

Friday, June 15, 2007

The Gravedigger's Daughter is Joyce Carol Oates' 36th novel (not including the 11 she's written under pseudonyms), but according to a press release, she has been at work on this book for 12 years. The harrowing story, the publisher notes, is "based on her own family's history in the upstate New York towns of the early 20th century."

The care Oates has taken with The Gravedigger's Daughter is evident in this dense psychological study of a woman who is beleaguered, from her earliest days, by disturbed, violent men. The rural New York setting that Oates has often explored in her work contributes to a pervasive atmosphere of menace with its "sultry" summer heat, obscuring foliage and humidity that promotes the sickly sweet smell of rot.

This is a long book, and there are many unexpected shifts in the narrative over the course of more than 500 pages. It encompasses a number of genres, including gothic horror, suspense, coming-of-age, historical fiction and a road-trip tale, to name a few.

After a brief section in which the title character, Rebecca, is followed in the woods by a man who mistakes her for someone called Hazel Jones, the novel settles into a story that is the inverse of the standard American immigrant tale. Instead of a portrayal of hard work leading to happiness and fulfillment, in Oates' world, which strips away the varnish from some American myths, hard work can also lead to humiliation and insanity.

Rebecca Schwart is born on a boat in New York's harbor in 1936 to German Jewish parents who had fled the Nazis. Although her father Jacob is college-educated, the only job he can find is a position as the caretaker of the graveyard in the town of Milburn, N.Y. Jacob's anger corrodes him over the years, and he turns on his family, ordering them not to speak German, rendering his wife virtually incapable of communication.

They practice no religion; Jacob discourages Rebecca and her brothers from befriending other children in town and doesn't support their education. Couple this with the creep-factor of growing up in a cemetery, and a repulsive older brother with incestuous designs, and this sets up Rebecca for an isolated life broken by intermittent entanglements in which she is unable to recognize when people mean her harm and when they can help her.

The long section about Rebecca's childhood in Milburn is difficult to get through. Jacob Schwart is repugnant in his appearance and his behavior; as Oates writes, "Like a troll he appeared. Somewhat hunched, head lowered." And, as in that sentence, Oates uses a lot subject-verb inversion in this section, which will make it difficult for certain readers to see a sentence such as "Graves of babes and small children, these were," and not hear it in the voice of Yoda.

Oates uses a technique of repeating certain phrases, images and scenes several times, mimicking the way one's mind ruminates on important details, but in this section, the events and personalities are so disturbing that the psychological verisimilitude of reliving them is not a pleasure.

Sick as it sounds, the novel gains a great deal of buoyancy after Jacob shoots his wife and himself and Rebecca is orphaned and, therefore, free. Rebecca proves herself a master of the skill that her father lacked: the American knack for self re-invention.

She gets off to a bumpy start, taken in as a teenager by a kindly spinster schoolteacher against whom she predictably rebels. Rebecca drops out of school, becomes a chambermaid at a hotel and meets the brutish, charismatic Niles Tignor, who claims he's a traveling salesman for a brewery.

Oates writes of Tignor, " . . . you gazed up at the man knowing yourself off-balance as if he'd reached out to poke you, not hard, but hard enough, his big forefinger into your breastbone."

The writing in the section in which Oates chronicles their courtship and difficult relationship is electric; Oates burrows into Rebecca's consciousness and renders her experiences with sustained intensity. Rebecca has a baby and Tignor turns violent, but just when the novel looks like it's going to turn into an epic chronicle of the abuse one woman suffers her entire life, Oates offers relief from this narrative. Rebecca, who witnessed her father's brutal killing rampage, turns out to be a steely, canny opportunist who flees, bruised and battered, taking her young son with her and eventually changing her name to Hazel Jones.

Oates' portrait of a woman leading a double life is masterful. While the Rebecca Tignor of the opening chapter is a "strong, fleshy" woman with thick, unruly black hair who curses and conceals a "sharp piece of scrap metal in her jacket pocket," Hazel Jones is a "girlish" woman with "feathery" hair and ladylike dress and manners, bent on helping her son become an acclaimed concert pianist.

Oates wrote The Gravedigger's Daughter in the third person, but at times the narrative is attached to Rebecca/Hazel's consciousness, and at other times it steps back and shows her as others see her. The transformation is at once astonishing and utterly believable.

With The Gravedigger's Daughter, Oates has created an intense portrait of a woman that no one but she could write. Drawing on her long-standing interests in violence, women's roles, recent American history and the influence of money and education -or lack of them - on the shape of a person's life, Oates has worked all of her major themes into a compelling, fictional life story.

Violent tides

Oates has spent much of her career chronicling violence in the lives of 20th-century Americans - and no wonder. Consider her family history:

• As a young girl, Oates' paternal grandmother came home to a locked house, only to hear her father beating her mother in an upstairs bedroom. Her father, hearing her at the door, came downstairs with his gun, went into the basement and shot himself.

• Oates' maternal grandfather was killed in a tavern fight.

• Oates befriended a young grad student who became obsessed with her. A few months after she tried to distance herself from him, the man brought a handgun into a synagogue, then shot and killed the rabbi and himself.

Jenny Shank's fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Image, and other journals. She lives in Boulder.