Reviewed by Nick Mamatas
For “Vena Cava” the success of the story is all in the delivery. At first blush, Joyce Carol Oates made all the mistakes one could make in this story of a terribly wounded war veteran, wracked with both pain and guilt, returning to his hometown. There isn’t a stereotype the author is above using—is our Lance Corporal relatively uneducated, and from a dying industrial town? Of course. Does he have a wife he distrusts, a toddler son he doesn’t understand and never bonded with? Certainly. A brother named Mack of all things? Yes yes. Does he wash down his medication with beer—Coors no less? Certainly. Are the older female relatives of our poor Lance Corporal “sag-faced teary women in puff-perms to make their small heads appear larger on their bulky bodies in J.C. Penney stretch-orlon pantsuits” from which “observed from the rear you could not easily distinguish between those fats asses”? That’s a quote, son. Need I even tell you how the story ends? I needn’t, it’s obvious, though I’ve not mentioned daddy’s old hunting rifle yet.
And yet “Vena Cava” is compulsively readable thanks to Oates’s precise and careful use of voice and point of view. Well-observed and mischievous—more Robert Bloch than any of Oates’s “literary” influences—the story chugs along despite the heavy baggage and occasionally imperious tone. The Lance Corporal doesn’t believe his child’s excited cries of “Dad-dy!” as authentic, thanks to his time assisting interrogations of insurgents. His wife makes a show of kissing him, of “running her red-painted plastic fingernails” along his mangled limbs as an ostentatious display of her love and “wife-status.” Someone’s swapped the hot and cold water faucets. Often the Lance Corporal feels like someone else entirely, observing a troupe of actors hired to play everyone he knows as they interact with a half-melted puppet. In another scene he is cast as Brad Pitt, and isn’t it a shame that his old girl is now twenty pounds overweight and thus not good for TV? Thanks to a sort of playful contempt, “Vena Cava” stays clear of sentimentality. Thanks to a measure of auctorial compassion for the characters—Oates’s voice translates the corporal’s self-regard into a narration by turns elevated and down home—the story stops short of wallowing in middle-class glee at the less cosmopolitan, and goes for and hits the horror.
Nick Mamatas is the author of the novels Move Under Ground, Northern Gothic and Under My Roof. He is the author of the short story collection You Might Sleep and has edited the anthologies Haunted Legends, Spicy Slipstream Stories, Realms and The Urban Bizarre.
He has written over thirty short stories and hundreds of articles
His forthcoming work includes the novel Sensation, a story in Supernatural Noir and the non-fiction book Starve Better.
Great review.
You obviously have never been to war and cannot appreciate the brilliance of Oates story Vena Cava. Did you ever hear of PTSD? You are such a jerk!!!!sheila