Not for the faint of heart.

You Must Remember This
Joyce Carol Oates

Man, Joyce Carol Oates is a weird bird. It’s so hard to describe to people what her books are like because each one is different from the last: you have realistic family drama; you have magical realism; you have stream-of-consciousness; gothic; love stories; true crime. In her spare time, J.CO writes romance novels under a pen name. The woman does a lot, is what I’m saying.

But in most of her work, you can’t help but notice that Miss Oates is supremely fucked up in some deeply intrinsic way, and in You Must Remember This it’s like she’s distilled this offbeat, shocking quality into its most potent form. In the first two pages alone, she writes of rape, murder, fratricide, anorexia, incest, abortion, and the Holocaust. If she’s setting a stage (and she is, whatever else she might be, old Joyce is a consummate professional) you know you are in for a deeply weird and dark tale.

And Remember is weird and dark. The story follows the Stevicks of Port Oriskany, New York, through the tumultuous 1950s, which are particularly tumultuous for this family. Lyle Stevick, patriarch, is worried about the bomb and obsessed with building a shelter for his family. Oldest son Warren is a veteran of Korea. Eldest daughter Geraldine gets in “trouble” and is forced to marry her Irish boyfriend. It looks like aspiring jazz singer Lizzie will follow in her elder sister’s footsteps, but it’s quiet, youngest-child Enid Maria that they should be looking out for. Because at age fourteen, Enid enters into a secret sexual relationship with her Uncle Felix, a retired professional boxer twice her age.

!!!

Enid Stevick still > Enid Rollins.

I worried at first that I wouldn’t be able to finish this book, because of how incredibly grossed and creeped out I was by this latter plot point, but as the Irishman said, a body can get used to anything, even being hanged, and despite my gorge rising in the beginning, after a while I wasn’t as bothered as I thought. (Which is a little upsetting in and of itself.) But Lord God, Oates doesn’t make it easy for the reader. Her sex scenes are only slightly less explicit than the ones written by Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer. But she must be doing something right, because there did even come a point where I, at least, sort of forgot about Enid and Felix’s blood kinship and started sort of rooting for those crazy kids in the back of my mind. I think that Oates is trying to say something, with this relationship, about the Fifties in general: it was a time of apparent safety and security and rightness, with a cold current of evil and fear bubbling just underneath the surface.

The family dynamic in this book reminded me a lot of We Were the Mulvaneys, and I think that Oates is a master of exploring the way that a family is one unit made up of separate histories. She’s probably the best writer that does this. At times the Stevick family is a riot of color and laughter and gaiety, you wonder how they can all be so close, but at other times you feel the deep, sad loneliness of each of its members. They will never understand each other—not really. They couldn’t if they tried.

I have a lot of thoughts percolating in my head even after finishing this book. Is it ever OK to flaut these taboos that society places upon us? When is it OK? Most of the relationships that Oates depicts in this novel are flawed to the point of no repair. Is this the way it is, in her view of humanity, in general? Or is it just the Stevicks, so tightly and narrowly constrained in their lives? The only member of the Stevick family whose head we don’t go into is the mother, Hannah’s. She remains such a shadowy figure: what is Oates trying to say by keeping her walled off from us? Does it have anything to do with why Geraldine is removed from us once she becomes a wife and mother? Is it a critique on what it meant to be a woman at that time?

Even if the story is dark, even despite the incest and abortion and the paranoia and the loneliness, this is an uplifting book, as most of J.CO’s stuff is, in the end. Sometimes I think, to be able to do this, she might be the most optimistic, hopeful person in the world, but at other times, I think she does all this horrid shit to her characters just to show off how nicely and smoothly she can get them out of it. In any event, this shouldn’t have been an uplifting book—a joyful book—but it was.

I think I’ll probably be remembering this book, these characters, for a long, long time. But I don’t think I will ever ever ever read it again. It’s too raw, and upsetting, for a second go-round.

Rating: 4 of 5 stars.