Solstice/Equal Distance
Jones, Robert
Books: STILL LOST IN THE NAZE IN the foreword to Them, Joyce Carol Oates writes of the woman she knew in Detroit who became the basis for her character, Maureen Wendall. Her initial feeling about...
...Whether jogging through the streets of Tokyo, lying in bed, or drinking in Kyoto bars, Danny prattles obsessively about the two events that have changed him: his admission to Harvard and his parents' impending divorce...
...As the epigraph to Angel of Light, Oates chose an eighteenth-century quotation from Man-deville's The Fable of the Bees...
...But at his moment of greatest despair near his story's end, he exclaims, "Let them all go...
...And so it happens with Monica...
...If the writing at times seems rushed, if the end to the novel comes abruptly, this fable of Monica's journey to the boxwood maze is free of the ponderousness that sometimes weakens Oates's fiction...
...As a writer, he lacks a sense of what is interesting...
...Equal Distance celebrates nostalgia for an idea of American boyhood that was false when Huck Finn first picked up a paddle to steer his raft downstream...
...For had Sheila Trask been Ariadne, she would have led him deeper inside the labyrinth only to yank the thread from his fingers once he was most hopelessly lost...
...Solstice" usually refers to changes of seasons and the earth's relation to the sun...
...During his year in Japan, Danny Ott thinks of nothing but home...
...All narratives, from the history of culture to the most idiosyncratic familial squabble, speak of the power of desire and the tyranny of love...
...He spends more time saying things beautifully than thinking about what he says...
...The novel suffers from the backward glance of an adolescent who believes everything that happens to him matters to the world...
...If Oates sees individual tragedy as symbolic of the loss of a larger world, her novels succeed because she enables the reader to imagine that other world...
...But whenever Leithauser leaves glimpses of rocks and swans and stars for an extended narrative, the poetry derails...
...For her part, Monica becomes lost in the thrill of discovering someone who seems to understand her completely...
...She tells Monica, "You have that dazed, precarious look...
...While technically efficient, it is stunted emotionally, and this same failure of imagination undermines Leithauser's accomplishment in Equal Distance...
...Sheila's malevolence and Monica's innocence always reflect upon their generosity and guilt...
...One wants to like Brad Leithauser and to admire his talent, but he risks nothing...
...But his facility with language cripples his narrative...
...Their legend is paradigmatic of our most misplaced ideas of selflessness and love: the belief that if we provide others with umbilical cords, our reward will be a lifetime of faithfulness...
...Near the end, lost in the boxwood maze on the grounds of the school where she teaches, Monica learns what Theseus discovered in the labyrinth: that slaying the monster is only a prelude to getting out, that most Commonweal: 150 changes of direction curve to another dead end...
...Fevers and obsessions exist in her work merely as the prelude to the realities of mass murder, assassination, and political betrayal...
...Go ahead: Let the whole thing collapse...
...The act of writing fiction, even at its most fantastic, is, for Oates, the means by which the imagination gives voice to reality...
...The long poem at the volume's center, "Two Summer Jobs," describes in bewildering detail the poet's tenure as a law clerk and tennis instructor...
...When she meets Sheila Trask in Solstice, she believes that she has found the person who will lead her to something extraordinary...
...Her initial feeling about the details of "Maureen's" life was,' "This must be fiction, this can't all be real...
...Danny's dislocation in Asia derives from his inability to conceive of anything larger than home...
...Equal Distance lacks the same overriding intelligence which prevents its story from becoming anything more than its narrowest surface...
...They give us adventure at its most specious and predictable...
...venturing forth depends upon an eventual return to the fold...
...Brad Leithauser's first novel, Equal Distance, concerns a coming of age of a more traditional variety, a young man's sojourn abroad as he travels from Harvard to Japan...
...Robert Jones public and private lives...
...Evil is necessary and expected...
...They become inseparable...
...Her experiments with style, from the contemporary gore of Wonderland to the gothic excess of Bellefleur, are all part of a single attempt to find the form which best articulates the increasingly unreal character of twentieth-century experience...
...It is a world that Danny Ott in Equal Distance has not begun to imagine...
...Solstice is her best novel, a macabre comedy about coming of age in a world where innocence exists as a failure of intelligence...
...What we call evil in this world, moral as well as natural, is the grand principle that makes us sociable creatures...
...What Oates accomplishes in her fiction is to trace the traditions of malice and treachery as they occur in our SOLSTICE Joyce Carol Oates Dutton, $15.95, 243 pp...
...Monica Jensen is in flight from an ordinary life...
...as if you were carrying your life in a pyramid of eggs...
...Joyce Carol Oates is our most prolific, serious writer...
...Sheila has the heartiness and the inexhaustible cunning of the best monsters, but Monica exhibits as relentless a drive to skewer herself with passion...
...What is missing from most critical judgment is that Oates, despite her occasional narrative wobbles, is the most relentless chronicler of America and its nightmares since Poe...
...In his depiction of the strangeness of Japan and the exoticism of its tongue, Leithauser retains his poet's ear for sound and nuance...
...Equal Distance celebrates an easier world, one in which the passing from adolescence to uncertain adulthood is achieved with a degree of trauma suitable for letters in a family circular...
...EQUAL DISTANCE Brad Leithauser Knopf, $17.95, 351 pp...
...As with many love stories, Monica's frenzy accelerates in step with Sheila's detachment...
...Equal Distance suggests that the earth is populated exclusively with Danny Otts...
...Monica's initiation in Solstice speaks of venturing into a life made terrifying by its tenuous boundaries...
...This is the point of the Atreus-like fall of the Hallecks in Angel of Light, of the ignominious Zinn family in A Bloodsmoor Romance, or of the legacy of Andrew Petrie in The Assassins...
...Yet she is also guileless...
...Tales of innocents abroad are a rite of passage in American fiction...
...8 March 1985:151 Each time Japan flickers to life, it is overcome by yet another discussion of Harvard and Mom and Dad back in Michigan...
...On some level, Ariadne and Theseus is a parable about the risks inherent in all relationships...
...Sheila has the unerring instinct of all true predators who find fragility an irresistible invitation to plunder...
...And happily, her conjuring of a menacing sense of dread remains undi-minished...
...But it can also mean a turning point, a culmination, or a furthest distance...
...The distances of which Leithauser writes are the shortest possible: a vision pulled forward and diminished under an adolescent eye clamoring for attention...
...Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, the wary traveler leaves her backyard for the danger of foreign territory, only to return fulfilled and changed...
...When Ariadne offered Theseus the clew that led him out of the labyrinth, the last thing she expected was to be abandoned by him...
...But this is not to suggest that Oates believes in sentimental myths of progress or decline...
...But while Poe is a master of hallucination as it infringes on the world, Oates has become, in the course of one hundred years of culture, our most severe realist...
...At twenty-three, Danny's understanding of doom stalls at the petulance of a thwarted child...
...They move from image to image with a sureness of perception that is consistently astonishing...
...Her output of poems, novels, essays, and short stories has become a sort of joke among readers who presume writing to be serious only if it exacts authorial collapse...
...Let Mom marry a shoe repair man, if that's what she really wanted, and Dad take up with a stripper...
...Three years ago, Brad Leithauser published the widely-praised Hundreds of Fireflies...
...The problems inherent in history are neither nature nor God, but the human being seated next to you at dinner...
...the moment evil ceases, the society must be spoiled if not totally dissolved...
...Danny has gone abroad to reflect upon his life and to change...
...And in the development of Monica's friendship with Sheila, Oates brilliantly evokes how easily our desire to love becomes a willingness to accept obsession and grief...
...The canvases are to be called "Ariadne's Thread...
...She fails to understand that Theseus gambled a trust as great as Ariadne's...
...Political history and tradition are always the subplot to the quivering of individual souls in isolation...
...Soon Monica begins to attend to the necessary details of Sheila's life so that she might be free to finish a series of nine paintings...
...In presuming to embrace the world beyond home, such tales often disguise our most xenophobic fantasies...
...The point is not so much that the world has changed for the worse, but that it has come into its own, something like an adolescent passing into achieved sophistication...
...What astonished her then, and has continued to astonish her through twelve subsequent novels, is that what she writes is true, that our most gruesome fantasies occur as natural behavior...
...And in her new novel, Solstice, Oates has written her most complex tale of the perversity of human emotion to date...
...But this reaction was followed by her more permanent response, "This is the only kind of fiction that is real...
...To perceive broader, historical significance in a family's saga, as Oates does in Angel of Light, is something different than to affirm the unraveling of the universe in a divorce...
...Solstice tells of the lengths we travel in pursuit of love and the myths of escape we misunderstand as freedom...
...But the novel's distinction is that it shows the complexity of emotion in even the most destructive relationships...
...Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, for example, panders to majority taste and paranoia while it pretends to mock it...
...The poems in that collection are notable for their evocation of nature's ability to startle and compel...
Vol. 112 • March 1986 • No. 5
