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More JonBenet Ramsey is no easy sell

By Quinn Fitzpatrick, Special to the Rocky

Published July 17, 2008 at 6 p.m.

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Writer Joyce Carol Oates

Photo by Jean-Pierre Muller / AFP/Getty Images/2005

Writer Joyce Carol Oates

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My Sister, My Love

* Fiction. By Joyce Carol Oates. HarperCollins, $19.95. Grade: C

Plot in a nutshell: Oates' new novel has one thing going for it: Her topic has suddenly become timely again, given the recent news stories about DNA evidence in the JonBenet Ramsey case. Here, Oates blatantly appropriates the story of the murdered young beauty queen in Boulder. While anyone who has followed the nearly 12-year-old saga is well aware that any embellished version of the case could never be as melodramatic as the original,Oates tryies her hand nonetheless.

Oates' variant is narrated by 19-year-old Skyler, the brother of Bliss Rampike, a 6-year-old ice-skating princess who was murdered 10 years before. Skyler's verbose account, told in first person but infiltrated with sanctimonious third-person narrative footnotes, aspires to act as an investigation into the murder and an elegy to Bliss. It becomes, instead, a diatribe against the pretentious elite suburban mentalities that tortured his life before, during and after his sister's murder.

He vents about his mother's fragile hold on sanity as she ventures into the elite country club society, his father's manic drive for success in the financial circle and his struggle to remain visible as his baby sister is forced into the public eye during her reign as "Ice Princess" in the skating world.

The parallels between the JonBenet and Bliss tragedies are sinfully similar. Both 6-year-olds were killed in their homes, found hours later in remote rooms, had the same doting mothers, the same removed fathers, the same-age brothers, the same wealthy backgrounds, the same . . . well, it's so much the same it borders on plagiarism. Like the JonBenet case, this version remains unsolved and speculative - even after its 562 pages.

Sample of prose: "I am a runty little kid with a smile so eager it looks as if it had been sliced by a knife."

Pros: Great word usage and fine prose are usually givens in Oates' works. She takes her ingenuity further here with fun wordplay that includes malaprops used by the pretentious father (e.g., monogramy, polygramy, foe paws) and made-up syndromes Skyler uses to describe his mother (R.C.S. - Repetitive Compulsive Syndrome) and himself (A.P.M. - Acute Premature Melancholia).

Cons: Even though Oates does some exploration into the narrator's psyche, she fails to add enough insight to make her version anything more than the tabloid story revisited.

Final word: After the latest glut of news, I cannot imagine that anyone is interested in more of this tired saga - especially in novel form.