The gravedigger's daughter A novel

WHEN all is said and done, when you have contended with the hampering undertow of Joyce Carol Oates's flaws, there comes a moment when you surrender to the overpowering force of Joyce Carol Oates's virtues. You yield to Oates much as her beleaguered heroines yield to the relentless, intoxicating strength of her dangerous men. Oates's routes of excess often lead to rambling mansions of truly apprehended life. On the other side of her sentimentality lies a rare intensity of feeling; driving her melodrama is a heightened receptivity to tragedy. Her stereotypes fall, like overripe fruit, from the fertile boughs of her archetypes. This is especially true in earlier novels like "Them," "American Appetites" and "Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart." Oates's fiction courses around the twin poles of our national existence: hybridity and fluidity. That makes her the most American of writers. But being quintessentially American also makes Oates vulnerable to a peculiar pitfall of American velocity - getting too excited about everything that happens. Oates is addicted to events. She is an Eventophile. Like small towns, her novels are often fixed on something sensationally dramatic that took place long ago and can't be shaken out of local memory. Her fictions pull like wild horses against this gravitational violence for hundreds of pages until something snaps and "closure" comes. Her need for closure, in fact, is Oates's great weakness, just as the evocation of exhausted yet resilient people straining for a fresh start is her greatest strength. There is more than a little Oprah in Oates's swings between grotesque sadness and sunny self-reinvention. That is to say, there is more than a little Hollywood schmaltz. But if something unreal hangs about Oates's overheatedness, then that is what also keeps her true to the overheated, unreal-seeming nature of American life, in which Hollywood movies seem less entertainments than actual experiences. Schmaltz can provoke powerful feelings, after all. Still, Oates achieves success as a storyteller when she overcomes her tendency to surrender to extremes. Her latest novel, "The Gravedigger's Daughter," springs to life when its central character, Rebecca Schwart, becomes pedestrianly shrewd rather than remaining superhumanly afflicted. The source of Rebecca's monstrous ordeal makes the first half of the novel mostly rough going. Along with so many other American fiction writers, Oates has discovered the Holocaust, and she labors mightily to incorporate it into her distinctive vision. Rebecca is the daughter of Jacob and Anna Schwart, German-Jewish refugees from Hitler. In 1936, they flee to America with their two young sons, Herschel and August; Rebecca is born in New York Harbor while the family is still on the boat that brought them over. A former mathematics teacher, soccer coach and printer's assistant, Jacob can find work only as a gravedigger and cemetery caretaker in the small town in upstate New York where the Schwarts have settled. Haunted by Nazi demons, his ego battered by prejudice and humiliation in his new life, Jacob torments his terrified wife and children. Finally he erupts and commits an incredible act of violence, traumatizing Rebecca yet at the same time releasing her into the world and a new beginning. Perhaps conscious of her plot's mythic weight - the European gravedigger's daughter reborn in America - Oates doesn't bother to give her secondary characters much depth. Jacob, Anna, Herschel and August don't so much act as reiterate the identities Oates has assigned to them. Once again, she has created people who teeter between archetype and stereotype. They thrive as the former when she evokes them in affecting expository passages, but they lapse into the latter when they interact along obvious lines. "Electricity doesn't grow on trees, want not waste not," the predictably parsimonious refugee Jacob likes to tell Rebecca, with equally predictable malapropism. Like many of Oates's heroines, Rebecca must outmaneuver her creator's literary purposes every bit as much as she must escape the social barriers of her world. At moments, Dates herself seems slyly aware of her own obtrusive artifice, particularly in her portrayal of Rebecca's relationship with her first lover, Niles Tignor. Passages in which she repeats words as if in a shaman's trance, and in which she alludes to some primal combat between man and woman, must be - one hopes so - conscious allusions to D. H. Lawrence: "She felt the thrill of her will in opposition to his. She felt almost faint, exulting in her opposition." (Except that Lawrence would never have succumbed to the jingly "thrill of her will.") After the jealous Tignor beats her and cheats on her, Rebecca flees from him with their young son, Niley. Here is where the novel at last becomes gripping and fresh. Through a portentous coincidence, Rebecca changes her name to Hazel Jones. Borrowing a name from the Bible, she makes her son Zacharias. Gates is at her best describing Rebecca's slowly growing attachment to Chet Gallagher, the disaffected scion of a wealthy family, who has found a second life playing jazz piano, just as Rebecca and Niley will find a second life with him. Oates's nuanced suggestion that jazz and movies - Rebecca meets Chet when she is working as an usherette in a movie theater - are regenerating opportunities for the aspiring American self amounts to a beautiful inhabiting of real people's everyday dreams. By that point, you might just forgive writing that has become so rushed it sometimes appears semiliterate. Oates's maddening habit of using "that" instead of "which" in a nonrestrictive clause - "most of the papers continued to run Chet Gallagher's column, that had won national awards" - is too ugly and incoherent to be an attempt at stylistic innovation. Such indolence is surprising in a writer of Oates's caliber. By the end of the novel, Rebecca/Hazel has thrown off her father's corrosive pessimism and drawn strength from his cynical cunning. She exists as a living, breathing, complex presence on the page. For the sake of her son, she exploits Chet, yet amid her maternal machinations she genuinely loves him, and Oates's depiction of such ungraspable ambiguity is masterly and wise. The novel's epilogue, an exchange of letters between Rebecca and a previously unknown cousin, a college professor who has written a book about surviving Theresienstadt (and whose embittered virulence Rebecca almost fiendishly reduces to its essential naked need), is virtually Dostoyevskian. As a connoisseur of modes of American doom, Oates is sometimes compared to Theodore Dreiser, the author of "Sister Carrie," a fictional guidebook to American variations on going under. But in the way her novels take off at the moment when her heroines break free. Oates is sometimes more like Carrie herself, more like a person writing about experience than a novelist writing about "them" - about nonwriterly people. At moments like that, you want to say about Oates what Ford Madox Ford said about "Sister Carrie"; you want to shout to the sky that Joyce Carol Oates is "a goldenish spot in the weariness of the world." Too bad all those sloppy, self-indulgent pages keep getting in the way. As a connoisseur of modes of American doom, Joyce Carol Oates is sometimes compared to Theodore Dreiser. Lee Siegel is a senior editor at The New Republic and the author, most recently, of "Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television." His "Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob" will appear in January.

The Gravedigger's Daughter A Novel Chapter One Chautauqua Falls, New York One afternoon in September 1959 a young woman factory worker was walking home on the towpath of the Erie Barge Canal, east of the small city of Chautauqua Falls, when she began to notice that she was being followed, at a distance of about thirty feet, by a man in a panama hat. A panama hat! And strange light-colored clothes, of a kind not commonly seen in Chautauqua Falls. The young woman's name was Rebecca Tignor. She was married, her husband's name Tignor was one of which she was terribly vain. "Tignor." So in love, and so childish in her vanity, though not a girl any longer, a married woman a mother. Still she uttered "Tignor" a dozen times a day. Thinking now as she began to walk faster He better not be following me, Tignor won't like it. To discourage the man in the panama hat from wishing to catch up with her and talk to her as men sometimes, not often but sometimes, did, Rebecca dug the heels of her work shoes into the towpath, gracelessly. She was nerved-up anyway, irritable as a horse tormented by flies. She'd almost smashed her hand in a press, that day. God damn she'd been distracted! And now this. This guy! Sent him a mean look over her shoulder, not to be encouraged. No one she knew? Didn't look like he belonged here. In Chautauqua Falls, men followed her sometimes. At least, with their eyes. Most times Rebecca tried not to notice. She'd lived with brothers, she knew "men." She wasn't the shy fearful little-girl type. She was strong, fleshy. Wanting to think she could take care of herself. But this afternoon felt different, somehow. One of those wan warm sepia-tinted days. A day to make you feel like crying, Christ knew why. Not that Rebecca Tignor cried. Never. And: the towpath was deserted. If she shouted for help . . . This stretch of towpath she knew like the back of her hand. A forty-minute walk home, little under two miles. Five days a week Rebecca hiked the towpath to Chautauqua Falls, and five days a week she hiked back home. Quick as she could manage in her damn clumsy work shoes. Sometimes a barge passed her on the canal. Livening things up a little. Exchanging greetings, wisecracks with guys on the barges. Got to know a few of them. But the canal was empty now, both directions. God damn she was nervous! Nape of her neck sweating. And inside her clothes, armpits leaking. And her heart beating in that way that hurt like something sharp was caught between her ribs. "Tignor. Where the hell are you ." She didn't blame him, really. Oh but hell she blamed him. Tignor had brought her here to live. In late summer 1956. First thing Rebecca read in the Chautauqua Falls newspaper was so nasty she could not believe it: a local man who'd murdered his wife, beat her and threw her into the canal somewhere along this very-same deserted stretch, and threw rocks at her until she drowned. Rocks! It had taken maybe ten minutes, the man told police. He had not boasted but he had not been ashamed, either. Bitch was tryin to leave me, he said. Wantin to take my son. Such a nasty story, Rebecca wished she'd never read it. The worst thing was, every guy who read it, including Niles Tignor, shook his head, made a sniggering noise with his mouth. Rebecca asked Tignor what the hell that meant: laughing? "You make your bed, now lay in it." That's what Tignor said. Rebecca had a theory, every female in the Chautauqua Valley knew that story, or one like it. What to do if a man throws you into the canal. (Could be the river, too. Same difference.) So when she'd started working in town, hiking the towpath, Rebecca dreamt up a way of saving herself if/when the time came. Her thoughts were so bright and vivid she'd soon come to imagine it had already happened to her, or almost. Somebody (no face, no name, a guy bigger than she was) shoved her into the muddy-looking water, and she had to struggle to save her life. Right away pry off your left shoe with the toe of your right shoe then the other quick! And then -- She'd have only a few seconds, the heavy work shoes would sink her like anvils. Once the shoes were off she'd have a chance at least, tearing at her jacket, getting it off before it was soaked through. Damn work pants would be hard to get off, with a fly front, and buttons, and the legs kind of tight at the thighs, Oh shit she'd have to be swimming, too, in the direction the opposite of her murderer . . . Christ! Rebecca was beginning to scare herself. This guy behind her, guy in a panama hat, probably it was just coincidence. He wasn't following her only just behind her . Not deliberate only just accident. Yet: the bastard had to know she was conscious of him, he was scaring her. A man following a woman, a lonely place like this. God damn she hated to be followed! Hated any man following her with his eyes, even. Ma had put the fear of the Lord in her, years ago. You would not want anything to happen to you, Rebecca! A girl by herself, men will follow. Even boys you know, you can't trust. Even Rebecca's big brother Herschel, Ma had worried he might do something to her. Poor Ma! Nothing had happened to Rebecca, for all Ma's worrying. At least, nothing she could remember. Ma had been wrong about so many damn things . . . Rebecca smiled to think of that old life of hers when she'd been a girl in Milburn. Not yet a married woman. The Gravedigger's Daughter A Novel . Copyright © by Joyce Oates. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.