The First Husband by Joyce Carol Oates from Give Me Your Heart – review

Reviewed by Chris F. Holm

I confess, I was surprised when Brian asked me to review this story, given my history with Ms. Oates. You see, she and I are embroiled in something of a literary feud. Not that I incited this feud, mind. Oh, no – that was all her. Who knows why she did it? Perhaps it was on account of my prodigious talent, perhaps because I too hail from – and sometimes write about – the frozen, desolate reaches of upstate New York. But whatever the reason, the facts are clear: I was all set to make my fiction debut in the March 2007 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, when Oates stepped in and, with great malice aforethought, had me forcibly removed from said issue.

That, or she submitted a story and, she being Joyce Carol Oates and me being me, the editorial staff made the easiest choice of their respective careers and bumped me to the next issue. Where, for the record, I appeared alongside a hero of mine by the name of Lawrence Block, so perhaps I owe Ms. Oates a debt of gratitude for her last-minute submission.

Reading “The First Husband,” it’s easy to see how Ms. Oates came to earn such deference: her prose is crisp, clean, and evocative; her characters so well-sketched and true-to-life you’d swear you’ve met them in the flesh – perhaps at an expensive (if dull) dinner party in their Salthill Landing home. The premise of the tale is simple: a man – blue-blooded, middle-aged, successful – happens across a set of Polaroids of his wife and her first husband luxuriating in beautiful Key West and becomes obsessed with the man, as well as with the young, vibrant woman he can now never possess. To him, this first husband represents everything he is not – a lithe, virile, sexual creature, as coarse and masculine as the protagonist is refined and ineffectual. As his obsession with the first husband grows, it threatens to upturn his marriage, and yet still he can’t leave well enough alone. Eventually, this obsession boils over into violence – but then, Oates’ stories always tend to, and anyway, to tell you any more than that would ruin the surprise.

In lesser hands, the story’s first act – comprised entirely of a man thumbing through a set of pictures – would be the dreary stuff of some empty MFA writing exercise. But in Oates’ hands, it’s riveting. The pictures become a Rorschach test of sorts, laying bare her protagonist’s insecurities. There’s an element of cuckold fetishism at play as well, for despite his jealous anger, he finds himself aroused – and unable to look away. As unable to look away as I suspect will be the reader.

That’s not to say the story’s without its faults. Much like its protagonist, it’s a little doughy around the middle, Oates taking a bit too long to establish the empty rituals of her characters’ ailing marriage. And the eventual violence is perhaps more arbitrary than poetic.

Then again, those criticisms could just be the literary feud talking…

Chris Holm is the author of the short story collection 8 Pounds.

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