Books: Urban Gothic

THEM by Joyce Carol Oates. 508 pages. Vanguard. $6.95.

The difference between heroes and most people is that heroes have destinies, while most people have only ambitions. With some fine adjustments for human limitations, Joyce Carol Gates demonstrates her intuitive grasp of this fact in Them, the latest novel in what has now become an informal trilogy about people’s frantic attempts to free themselves from the complexities of American life.

The first two novels were A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) and Expensive People (1968), both studies of frustrated love and self-destruction written with the intensity and control of fine short stories. Even before these books, Miss Gates had established herself as a promising young writer of remarkable power and sensitivity. With the publication of Them at the age of 31, she emerges as that rarity in American fiction, a writer who seems to grow with each new book.

Madding Emptiness. Set mainly in Detroit, Them spans three decades, from the economic depression of the late 1930s through the gathering moral and spiritual depression of the affluent postwar years. The book ends in the fire and blood of Detroit’s 1967 summer riot. On the surface, the book is hard, cold and terrifying. Its core, however, is molten with sympathy for the struggles of the major characters. The result is Urban Gothic, a type of naturalism saved from the simple cataloguing of disasters by the author’s ability to transform the mysteries of experience into vital characterizations.

Though they vary in complexity, all her people face the uncompromising difficulties of love and its opposite—not hate, but apathy—a madding emptiness that invites lust and violence the way deadwood invites fire. Loretta Wendell is in some ways the most fortunate. As a 16-year-old Depression waif, she wakes to discover that her lover, sleeping beside her, has just been shot through the head. Within the hour, a neighborhood policeman, more interested in investigating Loretta than the murder, has her back in bed. Marrying him to rise in the world, she eventually finds her level as a cheerful survivor, shifting from man to man, piecing together each new day from the wreckage of the old.

Loretta’s daughter, Maureen, also has trouble with men, particularly her stepfather, who nearly beats her to death. The battering reduces the girl to a state of psychic numbness. When her will reasserts itself, she plots to seduce and marry a man “gaunt with normality,” who already has a wife and three children. If she can’t have a life transformed by love, at least she can have a house and family in the suburbs.

Her brother Jules, by contrast, is consumed by passion. In Miss Gates’ intensely realistic world, he is a stunted Nietzschean hero, a drifter and petty criminal who lacks the imagination to refine love out of his shapeless longings. Yet he is not without hope. Caught up in Detroit’s summer riot, Jules discovers that his best instinct is for “senseless dreamy violence.” “Violence can’t be singled out from an ordinary day,” he tells a TV interviewer after the riot. “Everyone must live through it again and again; there’s no end to it, no land to get to, no clearing in the midst of the cities—who wants parks in the midst of the cities!—parks won’t burn!”

Click! It is not the message most viewers want to hear, but for Jules Wendell and the thousands like him who exist in the shadow of the national ideal, it is a savagely honest expression of liberation from zombiism.

Eloquent Letter. The Wendells—the “thems” whose histories are desiccated by news accounts and government reports—are not simply victims of economic and social disorder. Miss Gates has taken pains to make them convincing representatives of man’s tragic conflict between his need for passionate self-expression and society’s restraints.

Joyce Carol Gates’ pains, it turns out, were quite personal. As a teacher at the University of Detroit from 1962 to 1967, she first met the “Maureen Wendell” of the novel. She had been a student whom Miss Gates was forced to flunk for an inability to express herself. A few years later “Maureen” wrote Miss Gates an eloquent, obsessional letter about her sense of personal destiny.

Teacher and former student became acquainted, and “Maureen” confided the story of the “Wendells.” “Their lives pressed upon mine eerily,” says Miss Gates, “so that I began to dream about them instead of about myself, dreaming and redreaming their lives. Because their world was so remote from me, it entered me with tremendous power, and in a sense the novel wrote itself.”

Although rooted in case history. Them is fiction in the purist sense: data, perception, feeling transformed by language and imagination into a new existence with a vitality that can even survive critical explanation.