Exercises in the Sensational

...Soon he is insisting, in the interest of improving their poetry, that they keep "intimate, honest" journals to share with him and the rest of the class...

...Reviewed by Brooke Allen Contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "New Criterion, "Atlantic Monthly" The novella form sneaks in and out of fashion...

...Let's hope the powers-that-be at Knopf slipped the new edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage into Minot's Christmas stocking—and into her editor's as well...

...She was tired of having to look out for herself, tired of beating through thick brush...

...Andre Harrow, though, is not a human, flawed character, à la Jean Brodie...

...In the end the creepy Harrows get what they deserve, in spades, much to our satisfaction...

...Finally Kay, fed up with waiting, put an end to the affair...

...That is all we ever get to know about Kay and Benjamin...

...their apparent differences were due merely to cultural conditioning and gender stereotyping...

...in Beasts, as in some of Oates' other books, the atrocities are rehearsed with such loving precision that the reader is simply grossed out...

...Rapture is entirely constructed around —and this is not a joke, it is a straightfaced stroke of romanticism on the author's part—a blow job...

...This is the case with two new attempts: Joyce Carol Oates' Beasts and Susan Minot's Rapture both weigh in at barely more than 100 pages...

...She didn't realize how tired...

...He called those things obligation and loyalty...

...Joyce Carol Oates is far more skillful and accomplished than Minot— she ought to be, after having chumed out over a hundred books of fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction—and Beasts is not only more elegantly written than Rapture but better by almost any definition...

...Eros will strike, like lightning," and they lap it up...

...He is a true psychopath who preys, along with his sultry sculptress wife, Dorcas, on his more vulnerable students and makes them the couple's sex slaves...

...Which wasn't likely this...

...He wanted "no lies, no subterfuge, no "nice girfbullshit.' We were to record our dreams, our fantasies, our hopes, our visions...

...Another point of difference is in what we have come to call "confrontational style": When it came to whether he should leave Vanessa, for instance, or even tell her that he is seeing someone else, Benjamin was, "as he said, taking other things into consideration...

...Often, though, the novella reveals itself as merely a failed, or aborted, novel, a creature too frail and f leshless for full artistic life...

...Still, we are left wondering quite what the purpose of the story was...

...Kay and Benjamin represent contrasting aspects of femininity and masculinity rather than actual people: "This was a whore's job, after all...

...we were to examine our emotional, physical, sexual lives as if we were'anatomical specimens.'" The girls, needless to say, vie for his attention with increasingly racy journal entries, in which he takes a voyeuristic pleasure...

...But in the tale of Andre Harrow's manipulation of his poetry students there is the kernel of a very good story...

...She was dissolving into a sex personality, there to be used by him whenever he wanted...

...It is hard to avoid the conclusion that she is simply prejudiced against him for being male...

...Most of us have had, at some point in our young lives, a charismatic, psychologically dangerous teacher...

...To Kay they looked like avoidance and denial...

...Oates and Minot are capable, professional writers...

...it is unfortunate that it descends so quickly into mere sensationalism...

...if they have chosen the confines of the novella form, one would like to think it is because they know what they're doing, but each of these tales seems more like a misfired full-length effort than a well-plotted shorter one...

...Chills and thrills...

...Why did Minot decide to publish this...

...Nevertheless, it too suffers from a certain onedimensionality, giving the reader a similar sense of having gobbled down an inadequate and unnourishing meal...

...Ever since the intellectual tide turned in the 1980s, we have beenpainstakingly rediscovering the obvious, aided by accessible and simplistic documents like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, of which Rapture is only a marginally higher-brow version...

...a few students get burned, most survive...

...The more degraded she felt, the more saturated with sex, and happier...

...Minot, born in 1956, belongs (as do I) to a generation that grew up being told that men and women, contrary to assumptions the human race had made for millennia, were essentially the same...

...The longest one in recorded history, or at least it comes to feel that way to the reader...

...ourpersonal relationships with parents, siblings, friends, lovers...

...They are in their vigorous mid-30s, prototypes of the vaguely glamorous, stupefyingly self-involved cappuccino quaffers who peopled the lower levels of New York's art, literary and film businesses during the 1980s and '90s, and whom Minot anatomized in Lust (1989), her short story collection...

...and Kay finds penises "foreboding"—when surely she means "forbidding...

...Shades of Heathcliff...

...It's possible...

...It is also full of shockingly banal and shoddy writing...

...Trying to sort out the right way to behave if she was going to get where she wanted ultimately...

...Could it be a result of Minot's slumming about in the movie business, as the screenwriter of Bernardo Bertolucci's abysmal Stealing Beauty...

...Minot tries, or pretends, to give the hapless Benjamin equal time with Kay, but in the end she vindictively lets him fester in the personal hell his passivity and faithlessness have created...

...The couple involved are referred to as "old lovers," but should more properly be called "former lovers," since Kay and Benjamin are not old at all...

...After a work of that quality, the careless and immature Rapture is hard to account for...

...In Minot's scheme Woman uses sex to "commune," Man to "conquer...

...Joyce Carol Oates has never gone in for restraint on the subjects of sex and violence (she is the author of novels on any number of lurid topics, including Jeffrey Dahmer), and Andre and Dorcas are genuine nightmare figures...

...It doesn't really work on either level...

...Minot is not interested in their characters, only in their "relationship," insofar as noncharacters can be said to have a relationship...

...Benjamin cracks "some usual jokes...

...At least, that's what she'd convinced herself of...

...It was in him somewhere, that driving urge to overpower her...

...Rapture comes off as jaundiced and pissed-off, as though the author wanted personally to punish an unsatisfactory lover...

...Pity and terror...

...Huh...

...Rapture, in fact, was originally advertised as a novel, but evidently someone at Alfred A. Knopf thought better of the classification and affixed a blank sticker over the words "a novel by" before sending out the review copies...

...Now, a few years later, they meet again for an afternoon of sexual abandon that means something quite different to each of them...

...Andre Harrow assumes a Lawrentian pose: "You can't deny Eros," he tells the smitten girls...

...They are ogres risen from an archetypal netherworld to terrify children, or in this ease young girls just past adolescence...

...Her last novel, Evening (1998), was a graceful, bitter, fluid piece of work, one of the smartest and most memorable books in recent years...

...She was not particularly feeling his manly strength at the moment, he was not even moving, but she was aware it was in him...

...Oates' achievement in Beasts is not in imparting horror—for in this she fails— but in depicting with great skill, and with a kind of horror of its own, the very real danger a particular sort of teacher can pose, especially within an enclosed and isolated group of students...

...What teacher, much less editor, would let this prose get by...

...The following is typical: "She felt how wound up she'd been...

...It is 1975: Nineteen-year-old Gillian and every other student in her poetry seminar at a small New England girls' college are obsessed with their professor...

...claims that instincts "were easily mistaken with [rather than "for"] desires and fears...

...What relief this was...

...The narrative veers from Kay's point of view to Benjamin's and back again, the better to illustrate the fundamental differences between male and female...

...the film and the novella share a mindless fetishization of sexuality for its own sake that ultimately manages to make sex, that most perennially fascinating of all subjects, seem dull...

...They were lovers, it turns out, for three tortured years, but during that time Benjamin could never bring himself to break up with his longtime and long-suffering girlfriend, Vanessa...

...In Heart of Darkness Conrad merely suggested Kurtz' atrocities, so that the reader echoes his deathbed "The horror, the horror...

...At its best—in the hands, for example, of Henry James, Gustave Flaubert or Joseph Conrad—its spare structure imposes shape and discipline, and it can achieve a formal perfection that eludes the broader, more sprawling novel...

...A wise move, for Rapture is not so much anovel, not so much a novella even, as souped-up magazine fiction, real Cosmo-girl material...

...Although she may not be a writer for the ages, her work so far—three thoughtful, sometimes excellent novels and a collection of short stories—has established her as someone consistently worth reading...

...What can she have been thinking...

...You can't resist Eros...

...There is a problem inherent in writing about this kind of crime, however: When the author goes too far out of her way to disgust and appall, a numbing sensation is likely to result...

...And the grammar is shaky, too: Minot describes her characters—more than once—as "in thrall with" rather than "in thrall to" a lover...