Reviewed by Jedidiah Ayres
There’s a great line in William Gay’s Provinces of Night describing the songs sung by the Bloodworth family patriarch which unfortunately I’m going to have to paraphrase here – They start off sounding like a come-on and end up feeling like a threat. The title story from Joyce Carol Oates new collection is exactly like that, which is the good news. The story Give Me Your Heart is about a love affair that ended twenty-three years ago, the circumstances of its origin and demise are chronicled in a single letter sent by the younger woman to a now much older man with the plea to give her his heart. Literally.
Apparently she needs one. She figures he’ll kick any time. She further figures he owes it to her or, more accurately, promised it to her in a more figurative sense all those years ago.
Do you recall Leonard Cohen of the 1980s, the period after Phil Spector got a hold of him? Gone were the days of folksy crooning with a guitar and here to stay was the Casio-synth percussion and a significant drop in octaves. There were virtues – the sex had never been sexier and neither had apocalypse – and there were shortcomings – that damn boner killing saxophone breaking in on the party every few minutes. Only after a remove of more than twenty years have I been able to listen to something like say Jazz Police and pick out and enjoy the same great word-play he’s always employed at work underneath the layers of aerosol cheese he seemed intent on smothering that cut in. Don’t get me wrong, I still laugh. I still smirk and roll my eyes and think, what the hell? But I don’t necessarily skip the track anymore.
I’m not going to call this story the Jazz Police of Oates’ career, but I will say that for all the story’s virtues – twistedness mainly – it’s not quite insurmountable obstacle is its presentation, it’s format – the letter. Sorry, but it’s hard for me to stay checked into a story this complex when every couple of paragraphs I’m reminded that this is supposed to be a letter written by one character to another. I just never bought that. Were it a series of brief notes, perhaps I’d have been able to go with the flow better, but it was difficult to be invested on the level that I think I was supposed to be because I was constantly thinking – no one writes letters like these, who would do this, who packs all this exposition into an intimate communication? This is insane.
But, maybe that’s the point. Could that be Leonard Cohen winking at me from behind the Robert Palmer black-dress girls warbling about Jazz Police? Could it be that Oates is down with the soap-opera-ish qualities of this story and that it’s me who’s getting all hung up on “reality?” The woman writing the letter is crazed with the idea of collecting what she’s owed. The betrayal she suffered to enter the affair stacked next to the betrayal she felt at its end have driven her mad – which is cool – I just don’t want to ever stand behind this woman ordering a cup of coffee.
‘that damn boner killing saxophone’ – is that an American phrase. if i could, i’d patent it.
what an interesting batch of reviews. i’m not entirely sure whether i’m more curious now than i was before or not. on balance, i think i’m going in for more.