Split/Brain by Joyce Carol Oates from Give Me Your Heart – review

Reviewed by Nigel Bird

In itself, the tale at the centre of this piece is simple enough.

A middle aged lady, relieved for once of her duties of spending time with her broken-down husband at the clinic, returns home and sees and intruder in her house.

With a sense of her right to enter her own home without being afraid and in the suspicion that the intruder is, in fact, her nephew Jeremy, she goes ahead and challenges him in the kitchen.

What transpires is not for me to say, but I certainly felt fully sated by the outcome.

Unusually for me, it wasn’t the story itself that captivated me. I wasn’t led by plot or by character. What kept me wrapped up in Split/Brain was the beautiful use of language.

I started to imagine it being read as a poem at some point, with one of those slow, haunting American voices such as Robert Frost or Kenneth Rexroth occupying my head, changing then to Sylvia Plath to lead me to the end.

Take a look and you’ll see what I mean.

The sentences are often constructed in short phrases that link together, often feeding from each other. They move off in tangents and return to the main theme.

Situations are revisited, not just to give a change of point of view, but perhaps more to layer and hypnotise, to pull the reader in.

Then there are the bursts of lyricism: ‘expensive Italian shoe boots with a two inch heel’; ‘the driveway is a steep gravelled lane bordered by a straggling evergreen hedge’; and her nephew ‘tall lanky sloe-eyed Jeremy whom she has known since his birth’.

The climax of the confrontation is also deftly handled. It’s a scene that many others might have treated coldly or abruptly. Oates describes it with an unusual sense of tenderness.

I hesitate to suggest that this review is one to fully trust. I would, however, urge you to read it to make up your own mind. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Nigel Bird is the author of the short story collection Dirty Old Town.

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